First Night
by lennoxcontrary
Summary: <html><head></head>His agents come to him at night, looking for answers. If only he had some.</html>
1. First Night

**First Night**

**a/n: **_This is an AU episode tag for "Dead Reflection," Season 8, Episode 21. Spoilers through the beginning of Season 7 and mild spoilers for Season 8's "Dead Reflection." Also some reference to "Freedom," Season 8, Episode 13 and "Endgame," Season 7, Episode 7._

_I'd be happy to hear any of your thoughts on this, so please review if you feel so inclined!  
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**x x x x x x x**

_**Gibbs:** I've got to get her to open up._

_**Ducky: **Well I agree, but I'm not sure that you're the one for the job. Agent David has been through things that you and I can't even imagine. And she knows what it's like to be controlled._

_**Gibbs:**__ I'm not sure I want to open up those wounds, Duck . . . _

**-From **_**NCIS: Freedom**_

**x x x x x x x  
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Gibbs braced the handle of the chisel against his palm and turned the blade smoothly along a tiny groove cut into the wood. An elegant blond curl followed in the tool's wake. It really was a nice chisel.

When he finished the line he leaned back and blew on the wood to scatter the debris. The pattern that he'd picked out and traced with a penknife just last week was already beginning to emerge. He braced again, about to repeat the motion, but paused.

Something felt off.

He thought back and dimly remembered hearing a motor and a car door slam. Everything had been quiet after that. He put the chisel down and stood, rolling his shoulders to ease the stiffness out of his back. Absently he brushed the worst of the shavings and wood dust from the front of his shirt and headed quietly up the stairs.

A glance out the front window revealed a familiar car parked at the curb. His eyes swept over the lawn and driveway but nothing was out of place. It wasn't until he stepped close to the window and looked to the extreme left that he saw a figure sitting on his front steps. He stood and watched for a minute, but the agent sat there like a dark statue, making no move to come into the house or return to the car.

He considered turning away, heading up to bed. It was tempting. He was tired. And he'd been doing this long enough to know he didn't have all the answers.

The few things he did know to be true weren't easy to swallow. His cold conversation just a few hours ago with Dinozzo was proof enough of that.

But he was the boss, and he damned sure did his best to be a good one. So Gibbs walked into the hallway and opened the door. The soft night air was cool and comfortable, and smelled of spring. His neighbor's hyacinth was in bloom.

Ziva instantly stood and turned to face him. She looked surprised to see him there.

"Gibbs."

He waited, but she didn't say anything else. "Ziva. What are you doing here?"

"My apologies. I did not mean to disturb you."

Again he waited. Was she going to explain what she was doing on his lawn or what? But the _apology_ was all he got.

Gibbs looked her over carefully. She was busily smoothing a nonexistent wrinkle from her sweater. Nothing was obviously amiss, except that she was jumpy as hell.

"Something wrong?"

"No, everything is fine. I just . . . I did not expect you to be up."

Gibbs raised his eyebrows at that. It was almost 4 a.m. Neither one of them should be up. "Been a long week. You want to come in?"

She actually took a step back at that. "No, thank you. I did not – " She gestured vaguely at his dark house.

"Alright." He stepped outside, closing the door behind him, and sat down on the top step. "Have a seat," he gestured to the space next to him.

"Gibbs, I – "

She hesitated.

No surprise there. If his gut was working right . . . Gibbs was about as sure as sure could be that she didn't want any company tonight.

He didn't particularly care.

Ziva sat, finally, managing not to brush against him in the close space. She studied the house across the street as she stilled.

"Was that a test?"

"What are you doing here, Ziva?"

"Does that mean I passed?"

He didn't say anything.

The neighborhood was peaceful, but the silence between them was not. It was expectant.

She sighed. "I am not doing anything here, Gibbs. I will leave if you would like me to."

Still, he was silent. Waiting.

When she glanced at him he was looking across the lawn, not at her. But she knew he was waiting. It was part of what made him such a good interrogator. He knew when there was something more, something unsaid.

Well. She should probably just be thankful she was not often the subject of his interrogations and get on with it. She would be vague, leave as quickly as she could without embarrassing herself, and then forget this ever happened.

He broke the stillness by asking again. "What're you doing, Ziver?"

She stared at a little pool of light cast by a streetlamp, trying to figure out the least revealing thing to say. This is what their suspects did, she thought wryly, when they were trying not to incriminate themselves. She hoped she would be less transparent than the usual suspects.

Then again, Gibbs saw through most evasions. Sooner or later he always got the whole story. Actually, Ziva suspected that he often figured out the whole story much sooner than the rest of the team.

Usually that was impressive, but at the moment . . .

Maybe it would be better to be up front now, rather than suffer him finding out on his own, later. How he might do that she didn't know, but he was Gibbs. He found things out.

And he knew her well, that gave him an advantage. Ziva slumped a little as her mental calculations came to their inevitable conclusion.

She might as well tip her hand.

"You are not usually up at this hour," she said finally.

She said it so softly. The words almost seemed to slip into the dark before he could catch them. He frowned, but kept his gaze on his neighbor's shadowy hedges.

It would feel less like an interrogation if he wasn't facing her. At least he hoped it would.

"You come here often?"

She laughed. He grinned too, briefly. But the stillness, when it returned, was just as expectant.

"Not often. Sometimes," she admitted.

Damn.

Gibbs shifted, uncomfortable. He didn't want to open any wounds.

He was desperate not to, if he was honest with himself. But they couldn't be left to fester, either, and apparently they _were_ festering. Finding her in the dark on his front porch was a pretty good clue. And it wasn't her first visit.

Couldn't be much clearer if she'd been all wrapped up in a sad black bow.

What else could he do, but try to draw the poison out?

He didn't have all the answers, but he did have a few. This was one question he must know all the answers to, never mind that it was rhetorical. He'd thought about it often, after all. Been tempted more than he liked to admit to go with the easy answer. He'd made some bad mistakes that way, before he understood that there are some things you can't take back.

What else could he do?

Well, first he could call up Dinozzo to give his blessing to the Senior Agent's latest romantic adventure. The kid has been hopeful as a puppy asking for it, and looked just like a kicked puppy when Gibbs had given him an honest answer: No. No you can't have my blessing. Yes, I am a bastard. Did you forget? No, I won't bend Rule 12 for you and _EJ Barrett_.

Dinozzo and EJ, god almighty.

What else could he do?

He could say sure Tony, date her, have fun. Then he could kick back and listen to the tick of the emotional bomb that his senior agent was building with Barrett. Gibbs knew EJ Barrett. All too well, unfortunately. She would walk away, the bomb would explode, and Gibbs would watch it destroy Dinozzo. As if the man wasn't already cut to pieces by all the women who had walked, or been taken, out of his life.

All the king's horses and all the king's men . . . how many times could Tony be put back together again?

What else could he do?

He could stand up right now, say goodnight and go to bed. Leave Ziva sitting alone in the dark forever, as she no doubt wished he would. See ya later, Ziva.

They came to him with the questions that kept them up at night. Not because they didn't know the answers. He was sure of that. They _did_ know. They came because they hoped he would save them from the hurt. They wanted different answers.

But he had none.

So he held his breath and ripped open wounds, and hoped for his part they would heal someday.

_Not often_, she'd said._ Sometimes. _What did that mean?

"Why come here?" he asked.

Ziva sighed, resigned to it now. It was her own fault. She'd shown up at his house in the middle of the night. He'd caught her _lurking_. It was the Gibbs equivalent of throwing herself in front of a train. Sure to get his undivided – one might say inescapable – attention.

"It is peaceful here. Usually," she muttered.

Gibbs waited for more. Damn him.

"When I first - " She faltered, started again. "I am restless, sometimes, at night. My apartment feels small."

_Restless._ Oh, he bet she was. He suddenly wanted to run. To punch something and yell. Anything, really, that would take him away from this, away from where it was going. Take them both away.

After a minute he shifted, propped his chin in his hand to keep himself quiet.

"I see them. When I close my eyes," she waved a hand. "In dreams."

Ziva cleared her throat. What had he asked her again? Oh yes. Why was she loitering on his porch. She spoke slowly, but he didn't interrupt.

"I took to driving around the city at night, when I couldn't sleep. I drove by your house sometimes. Then one night I stopped here. I was going to come in. . . I thought, perhaps . . . But I did not want –" she broke off abruptly. Regrouped.

"I never got out of the car that first night," she shrugged. "I drove away."

Her palms were suddenly sweaty and her neck felt stiff. She started to speak a little faster, just to get it over with. "And then one night I got out. I came to your door, but it was so late. Even for you. The house was dark. I thought you must have been asleep. . . . I knew your door would be open but when I tried it - then I was not sure if – if I –" she took a deep breath, "if I wanted to come in. But I did not want to go home. So I sat on the step. It . . . seemed quieter here," she trailed off lamely.

He waited.

"When I – the second time . . ." her hands fluttered in a _you get the picture _kind of way. "It is nice, just to sit here, so . . . " she shrugged.

Gibbs tried to wait her out, hoping she'd say what the hell that all _meant_, but she was silent. An eternity passed, and Ziva was a statue.

Maybe she actually thought she'd answered the question. Gibbs took a breath.

"You feel safe here?"

She didn't deny it.

Didn't agree, either. And she definitely didn't want into the house.

"Safer?" he said quietly.

She nodded and shrugged quickly, both together.

What did that mean? Was it a maybe? She came to his house and sat on the porch because this half-way space felt sort of safe?

He didn't know who else she had to talk to. He needed to know how long she'd been struggling to talk to him. He was guessing her mind had decided that he was the best equipped, at the moment, to have her six while she fought whatever ghosts were haunting her lately. Even if he had been oblivious to the situation thus far. But what had been the trigger for her to come to _him_? He thought over their recent cases.

"What night was that?"

She glanced at him, puzzled.

"The night you first came here?"

"What does it matter, Gibbs?"

He waited. The silence that stretched between them pulled at her like taffy. Thick, sticky, hard to escape. Finally she gave up and sighed again. It seemed louder than it should have, like it was the only sound in ages.

"It was November."

He blinked and sat forward, turning to look at her directly. "November? _Five_ _months ago?_"

Damn him. Must he be so specific?

"No. The year before."

Gibbs gaped at her, then turned sharply away. As much as the step would allow. If he scared her now . . . He shook his head. He couldn't do that.

He pulled up his fiercest DI voice to shout the anger down. Pulled in his arms and gripped his knees, hard, to keep his hands from flying around. Didn't need them to look like punches in the making.

And then he just sat there and breathed, waited for the rush of emotion to fade.

He'd learned to do that in the Corps, when he was young and hot-headed and got into arguments with just about every officer he came across. It'd come in handy undercover. With his wives, too.

He didn't usually bother to restrain himself with his team, that's for damn sure. Didn't usually need to.

It took a minute, but when he finally spoke he was in total control, even able to recognize that he _wasn't_ angry, exactly. The problem was this situation.

It was out of control, had been for a long time. And he should have realized. His normal reaction to that . . . well, it looked a lot like anger.

_The year before._

"That's seventeen months ago," he said flatly. "A year-and-a-half."

Ziva just cocked her head and stared at the house across the way.

Gibbs forced himself to sit back. To unclench. It was what it was, now. Had she not talked to anyone in all that time? Had she _never_ talked to anyone? Was that what she was saying? Was that _possible?_

He remembered telling Ducky she would talk when she was ready. He had assumed she'd found someone outside of NCIS, since she wasn't talking to him and he knew she wasn't talking to Duck. But they were men, and it would make sense that she would want to talk to a woman, and someone outside of work, too.

Was he just making excuses for himself?

She'd seemed to be getting along fine, on the job . . . but then, Ziva had always been able to separate her personal and professional lives to an extreme degree. She'd killed her own brother on the job, as he once so kindly pointed out.

She'd fooled him, alright. To be fair, he hadn't known she was sitting outside his house in the middle of the night, chased out of her own home by memories.

How often did she come here?

He rested his arm on the side of the step next to him and cradled his head in his hand.

"What was it that first night? The trigger?"

"Kai," she said simply.

Gibbs nodded slowly, remembering. Kai. The little Korean girl who had grown to be nothing to anyone, even herself, but a killer. Pitiless men had created Kai, controlled her, played her as they liked. Finally she had escaped them in the only ways she could imagine, with the only bit of power she had ever known. Killing, of course, and death.

_I am already dead . . . _

_I am ready to die . . . _

_I had nothing but death in my heart._

Gibbs' heart sank and he cursed himself for being blind. He hadn't seen this coming because he hadn't wanted to. And that was unacceptable.

He wondered if Ziva understood how much she'd just revealed.

"What about tonight?"

Ziva shrugged and the silence returned.

He decided to cut her some slack. It wasn't as if he didn't know her triggers, most of them anyway. He could guess them at least as well as she could guess his.

"Ducky said you had bruises on your arms and around your neck. From Tunney."

"Superficial. I am fine."

Right.

The silence between them got into its own rhythm, playing out into minutes. Gibbs glanced at Ziva. She'd closed her eyes.

"I thought he was different," she finally said. "That he was apart from this life."

He frowned, thinking back over the day, the week. It came together suddenly, and he sighed. It had been a long week for everyone. "Ray?"

"He is an analyst, rarely in the field. I thought it would be different with him, but that was stupid. When did I become so stupid, Gibbs?" She laughed weakly.

It was wrong for a sound like that to come from her.

"Why stupid?" he asked softly.

"There is nothing apart from this . . . It follows me . . ."

Now it was his turn to close his eyes.

He forced them open to look at her as he spoke. She needed to believe this.

"It won't always be like that, Ziva."

She laughed genuinely now, if bitterly. The sharp sound rang out in the quiet night. "Really, Gibbs? Speaking from personal experience? Behold, the Man Who Was Healed?" She huffed. "That is - what do you call it - a _hard sell_."

When the silence settled again he could almost feel her bitterness falling away, her shame creeping in to take its place.

It was amazing that he'd never heard her succumb to it before. She didn't seem to have it in her to be bitter, despite the fates' best efforts. If anyone proved that you could reinvent yourself, renew yourself no matter what horrors and betrayals lay in your past, it was Ziva.

"I am sorry, Gibbs. That was – " she stood. "I will leave."

"Ziva," he just stopped himself from reaching out to grab her. "Stay."

She shook her head. "I should not be here. Thank you for sitting with me."

He'd have laughed at that, another day. _Thank you, Gibbs, for interrogating me when I am vulnerable. I appreciate it._

"Where are you going?" he demanded, still not moving from the step.

She looked away.

He knew she had a thing about lying to him. Even as a liaison officer she'd avoided outright lying. Anyone else in that position would have been blasé about it.

Since Somalia she had been painfully honest. Painfully.

"I will drive for a while," she said. "I will be fine."

"How often do you come here?"

She shook her head.

Right.

"Ziva." He tried for matter-of-fact. "Have you talked to anyone."

It really was like an interrogation now. She looked numb, her eyes . . . she could have been a thousand miles away. He had seen that look from her only once before. His gut twisted and he had to turn his face away.

"I talk to many people, Gibbs."

"Don't play with me, Ziva. Have you talked to anyone about Somalia."

"You know everything that happened."

He took a steadying breath. "That's not the same."

God, now it felt like an interrogation to him, too. One of the bad ones. He flashed back to Georgia Wooten, proud and steady, a Gunny like him. Pushing pictures of her own beaten body across the table at her. Ripping open the one part of herself she kept so carefully hidden. Ripping _her_ open.

He'd gotten her to open up, alright.

Ziva shook her head, literally leaning toward her car but unwilling to disobey him in the smallest thing, no matter the circumstance.

That was new since Somalia too.

He sighed and straightened his shoulders, studying her openly at last. He had no photographs of what had been done to Ziva. But he did, as she insisted, know "everything that happened" in Somalia.

She'd needed medical attention when they hauled her out of that compound. Immediate medical attention. Fortunately the unit they had briefly trained and traveled with was equipped with a mobile hospital. It was the only place within a thousand miles ready to pass the team's standards for both security and level of care when it came to treating Ziva.

The medics and the doctor were well-trained. But they were strangers, and they were all men. The team left her on her own in the tent for privacy, but Ziva couldn't handle that at the time. She'd become violent almost immediately.

Of course she'd hurt herself more than anyone else. She'd been too weak to walk, was barely able to stand, much less fight. So Gibbs had returned and stayed with her. He hadn't really spoken, only told her to let them help her.

He sat there as she'd been . . . examined . . . questioned . . . ripped open, essentially, by yet more strangers. Men she had no wish to know. She'd submitted to it.

But then, he'd asked her to.

He hadn't known at the time that she'd cultivated such extreme trust in him. That she likely submitted _because_ he instructed it. It probably wouldn't have mattered if he had known. She'd needed help and he didn't regret that she got it. Still, he couldn't really wrap his mind around it, even now, and didn't want to think about it hard enough to try.

No matter that those medics meant to help, instead of hurt. She hadn't wanted to be there, obviously, and it _had_ hurt.

It was the doctor she talked to. He'd asked her to explain her injuries and she'd followed his instructions, replying to all the painful questions with painfully honest answers.

Gibbs had held her hand and turned his face away, trying to give some illusion of privacy. She was interviewed, stripped, hastily cleaned. The doctor examined and treated her and finally, carefully, she was redressed.

His throat had ached fiercely through all of it and his head had begun to pound, as if someone was hitting it with a mallet. He'd needed to _do_ something, but all he could do was sit there. To his own astonishment he'd cried. It was silent, but his face was wet from more than just sweat.

He couldn't remember the last time he cried in public. The girls' deaths, probably.

It wasn't something he struggled not to do after Shannon and Kelly. It just hadn't ever happened again, until that tent.

He wasn't sure that Ziva ever noticed. Once she was convinced he wasn't going to leave her alone she hadn't seemed to notice he was there at all. She'd let him hold her hand, but she hadn't shed any tears. She answered questions and obeyed instructions and looked as if she were a thousand miles away, numb to it all.

He understood, at the time, that this was how she'd survived. She'd gone away in her own mind.

It had taken three hours. And it was brutal, from start to finish.

Just the memory of it made him feel lightheaded and uncomfortable, even sitting here in the cool night, on his own porch.

Her scratchy voice, the hot tent and thick air. Gibbs sitting as still as possible, sweating into his fatigues. The doctor trying to be gentle. Ziva's hand jerking in his.

Afterwards, McGee and Dinozzo had come in to ask how she was. Her hand had pulled away from his and Gibbs sat there, silent, as she told them she was fine.

Before they'd even gotten on the plane home she'd demanded that he treat her as he always had. As if the nightmare really had been a nightmare. Just like Dinozzo, she didn't like it when he was "nice."

When he'd slipped and was too kind she screamed and said she didn't need him to hold her hand. Gibbs didn't treat her any differently after that.

But Ziva was a regular character in his dreams, now. Another woman entrusted to his care that he hadn't saved, even though she'd gotten out of there alive in the end. In his nightmares she rarely lived.

He pushed all that away and turned his thoughts back to the Ziva currently standing on his front lawn.

Knowing what had been done to her wasn't the same as talking through the wounds that still lingered in her mind.

He was ashamed of the impulse, but he really wanted to call Ducky, let him handle it. That would be useless, though. Ziva had avoided all of the doctor's careful overtures. He wanted to call Jen, suddenly. She'd have known what to say, when to step in. He'd let this get away from him . . .

But that was worse than useless. Jen was gone. Ziva had come to him. He could only pray he didn't screw this up.

_You know everything that happened._

He braced himself, tried to think of a gentle way in.

"You didn't – with Ray?"

She gaped at him and he hastened to rephrase. "You didn't _talk_ about it with Ray?"

If anything she looked at him like he was even more insane.

Fuck it, he couldn't do this by pussyfooting around, he wasn't a damned therapist. He hoped that anything he did screw up wouldn't mean a setback for Ziva.

"Were you intimate with Ray?"

"Gibbs."

"Ziva."

He knew that she needed to talk. She couldn't get perspective on what was in her head all on her own.

If she could, she wouldn't be standing on his lawn right now. The fact that she hadn't already run for her car must mean she was finally starting to realize the same thing.

At last she nodded.

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him that I was born in Israel. I told him I was a member of the Mossad before I became an American citizen and joined NCIS."

He waited for her to go on, but she had stopped. "What else?"

She shook her head, but he couldn't believe it.

"You didn't – Ziva," he whispered.

Nothing.

"Tell me you told him. Something."

She didn't respond.

"Sit down."

"Gibbs, it is late - "

"Sit down."

She sat, pressing herself into the far corner of the step. Gibbs ran a hand up over his face. There was acid in his throat and in his head . . . white noise. He needed to get back to safe ground before he lost it.

"You realize you can't run from this? You need to face it or it _will_ always follow you. The only way I know how to deal with these kinds of problems is to talk them through."

"Gibbs," hysterical, surreal laughter bubbled up in her throat. "I am not a talker. And what does that make you? A functional mute, that's what . . . Tony . . . ," she trailed off. The laughter had died away.

He waited.

"You are right," she admitted. "Ignoring it has not been . . . it has not been working, lately. Yes, I realize that."

It hadn't been working_ lately?_

_God. _Gibbs wondered, briefly, if this is what Ducky felt like all the time. Duck was the one usually talking them through their troubles and Gibbs knew, theoretically, that Ziva wasn't any more stubborn than the rest of the team.

"May I ask you a question?"

He turned to her, incredulous.

"It is personal," she explained.

"Ziva," he huffed a laugh. "I'd like to see you come up with something more personal than what I've just asked you."

"But you are . . ." she waved a hand. The movement itself looked doubtful. "You are trying to help me."

"Just ask," he sighed.

"Has talking helped you?"

Well. He should have expected that. Maybe he would have, if he'd ever imagined having this conversation with Ziva in the first place. She was an intellectual just as much as she was a fighter. Ziva always did her research, and now she wanted to know if this sort of thing had worked for him.

He thought about how to answer that.

He was a very different person when he was a boy, as his father liked to remind him. He used to talk to his mother, really talk. And he'd been happy, so purely, naively happy. Even though he was young they'd talked about real things. He still missed her sometimes, still felt her presence in his mind.

He'd talked to Shannon about everything, though most of the time he didn't even need to say much. She'd understood him. He remembered being so surprised when they first fell in love. He'd never known it was possible to be so close to another person.

After he lost them no one else came close.

Gibbs wondered if Ziva had ever had a similar relationship. Gibbs was an only child, but maybe she had been close to her sister, or even Ari. Ziva never mentioned her mother, and he wasn't about to ask.

After the girls' deaths he hadn't talked to anyone at all. He'd withdrawn, gone into the field with Franks, where all they talked about was the job. Murder, violence, justice. Repeat.

Then he had disappeared into those disastrous marriages . . .

He'd thought he was rebuilding his life. He pieced together those relationships so carefully. It took a long time to understand that it had all been a sham. Marriages as deliberately crafted and ultimately false as all the boats he'd built in his basement through those years, doomed to burn before they ever touched a drop of water.

He'd tried so desperately to separate himself from the pain that had dogged him. That horrible feeling that he was adrift, alone and drowning in his own sea. In the end, his best days had been numb.

He could feel Ziva looking at him, knew he'd been silent for a long time. But he wasn't going to give a half-ass answer.

When he'd lost his memory, and lost them all over again . . . at first it was almost worse, if that was possible. He hadn't even been able to focus on revenge. That was what got him through the last time, what got him moving. But there was no one left for him to vent his rage on when he'd woken from that second coma, no one left to kill.

So he'd dropped everything and run off to the beach.

And funnily enough, he'd managed to patch himself up. He'd really talked to Franks some, down at his place, about a lot of different things. He'd started to let people in after Mexico, bit by bit. It wasn't like with Shannon, of course, but it was something. And at least it was honest.

He was more open with the team these days, and with his work in general. A little bit, anyway. He had reconnected with his father. Been more realistic with the women he dated. Hernandez, the blackest part of his past, had literally been unearthed. But his team stood by him.

It had all worked together to ease something inside. Some of the pain had been drawn away, and not just from the hole that Shannon and Kelly left. Friends he lost in the Corps, and in the field. The divorces and all of the other blows and cuts and scrapes that came with life.

He didn't necessary feel good or bad now. But he wasn't numb. The good memories were good again, and the bad – he felt free of it, finally. It still hurt. He knew it would always hurt some. But it didn't poison him like it used to.

"It has," he said slowly. "It helped. Didn't happen right away."

She studied him, searching his face for every nuance before she went back to looking at his grass.

He grinned in the face of her seriousness. Couldn't resist. "Haven't you noticed?" he teased. "I'm new and improved."

She smiled shyly, looking at him quickly and then away again. God she looked young when she did that.

"You have not remarried," she pointed out softly.

"Yeah," he said. "Exactly. Progress."

"Oh! You are okay now. To be alone?" She gazed at him steadily, her dark eyes soft.

Well, he managed not to get up and walk away. When had this become about him? He'd gone weeks without talking as much as he had in the past hour.

"It's better than before," he managed. He concentrated on keeping his ass on the step and the conversation going, and vaguely hoped he didn't sound too pissed off.

The sky hadn't lightened yet, but the birds were starting to sing.

"You ever tell me why you came here tonight, Ziva?"

"Gibbs," she sighed. "Thank you for trying to – " she waved that doubtful arm again. "To help. But I cannot do this."

"Why not?"

He could be calm, now. He already had this pegged as one of the easy parts, after that bit about Ray.

She paused for a moment, then spoke up in her usual tone. "You will not want to work with me," she said bluntly.

Fucking hell. Ducky was a _saint_.

Agencies had _battled_ each other for this woman. _He _had fought for her, repeatedly.

Gibbs shook his head, trying to stop himself from dismissing her out of hand, but it was hard. Ziva. With a crisis of confidence. Unbelievable.

He knew his kneejerk reaction wasn't going to be real helpful here, and fought to reign it in. Her concerns were real enough to her, even if they were goddamn absurd.

"Ziva – "

"Gibbs, you are my supervisor. There are certain . . . If I said certain things, you would be obligated – " she broke off and waved the doubtful arm again. But it was slightly more encouraging now. A _you fill in the blanks_ arm.

"Ziva, if I honestly reported everything that went on with this team we all would've been fired a thousand times over. But the brass doesn't want us to report everything. You know why?"

He continued without looking over to check whether she wanted to know why or not. "Because we're damned good at our jobs. You're damn good at your job. That's why you're on my team."

He paused, searching for the words to reassure her.

"I would never report anything that you said to me." He wondered if she was worried about information getting back to her father. "I wouldn't reveal anything you said to me in confidence, to anyone."

"But _you_ would know," she persisted.

"Yeah? So?"

"You wouldn't want to work with me," she said.

He was close, he realized suddenly. He could feel her considering him.

Don't screw this up, Jethro.

"Look, Ziva." He sighed. "You said I know everything that happened, but you know that's not really true. The physical stuff is never the worst of it." He sought out her eyes again. "I know you're hurting."

_You're human, kiddo. Didn't they ever tell you?_

"I'm not going to think less of you for that," he said firmly.

She shook her head.

She didn't need to say it, he recognized it when he saw it. His eyes, his body, his hands used to say the same thing, years ago, if anyone had cared to read them. Maybe they still did, sometimes, but only for brief moments.

He started to understand, just then, how deeply he had changed. _Healed_, Ducky would say. It had happened so slowly, at times so painfully. He hadn't really taken a step back to see it before.

He looked out at the night. Early morning now. The sky had taken on a hint of deepest blue. It was beautiful, and he let his eyes soak it in.

"Ziva. You don't honestly think you're the only one?" he said softly.

She didn't respond. He waited, but she was quiet.

A minute later he saw her head bow into the cradle of her arms from the corner of his eye. When he turned to look at her she was shaking.

He scooted closer, slowly, until only a hairsbreadth remained between the t-shirt stretched over his shoulders and her thin sweater. He propped his right arm on his thigh and extended his open hand, letting it rest in the air just in front of her knees.

"Ziva," he said, "Okay?" She reached out to grab his right hand with her left, drawing it into her body and gripping it hard.

He squeezed back and stared at the sky as she breathed through it, silent tears dripping down onto the step between her knees. Looked like she cried just like him.

The day had bloomed to a gorgeous pale blue by the time she steadied, though the street was still deserted.

On a normal day he would already be headed into work by now.

"It was Tunney," her voice was low when she finally said it, but steady.

He turned slightly to face her. She had raised her head up to the sky, too, to watch the light bleed into the world and the dark creep away. The grip on his hand was still firm. "When he had me around the neck, it was like them. In Somalia."

"Last night . . ." She trailed off, adjusted her grip on his hand. "It was like they were there. In my apartment. In my bed. Not Tunney," she said dismissively. "The other ones. I had to get out of there."

He nodded.

She muttered an oath and appeared to glare at her car. "This is so stupid," she whispered fiercely.

She didn't say anything else for a long time.

"Why stupid?" he asked eventually.

The hand gripping his flailed a bit. "Do you know how many times I have been put in a choke hold, Gibbs? Can you imagine? Ari used to do it around the house, from the time I could walk. He thought it was a fantastic game. So did I! It must have been ten times a day. And then in training, my god, we spent our lives pinned down, or pinning others. We didn't _hug_ at Mossad," she said scornfully. "We practiced holds. A reflex away from death all the time. Now this," she gestured with her free hand. It was more a contemptuous flick than a wave. "This _Tunney_ has an arm around my neck for less than a second and I'm – " she jerked the arm again, indignant, "I'm a -" the arm kept going, "a wreck! There's no _reason_ for it. It is stupid," she growled. The hand shot into the air, slapping the face of whatever hapless god had dared to give Ziva David a disobedient psyche.

Gibbs ducked his head, hiding the faint grin he couldn't hold back. This was his Ziva. First time she'd shown up tonight.

She was quiet again.

The neighborhood was starting to wake up now. A few cars passed. A child's voice called to someone, echoing down the street.

"Your mind isn't remembering Tunney, or your family," he pointed out the obvious. He knew all too well how hard it could be to see from the inside. "It's remembering Somalia."

"Yes," she nodded grimly, "And it is stupid. I should be stronger, I should be better, shouldn't I? Isn't that the point of experience? But that is a trap. A few months there has overcome years elsewhere. A few months, and they made me weak. I know they're dead. But they live inside my head."

She breathed deeply. "I can't get them out, Gibbs."

"You can. You beat Tunney," he reminded her. His mind flashed back to the big bastard looming over her and his heart skipped a beat, again.

"You're not weak. Somalia . . ." He did his own little hand gesture. _All that stuff, yes it's complicated_. "You haven't recovered yet. But you will, Ziva, if you work through it."

When he looked at her she was studying the house across the street again, finally revealed to them in the full light of day. She was frowning, as if doing a mental jigsaw puzzle. Maybe she was trying to imagine the Somalia piece being made to fit back into its three month slot.

He gave the hand he was holding a little shake. "You gonna wake me up next time?"

She shook her head again, disbelieving. "You really want me to wake you up every time I – " the hand wave, this time a lazy _you know_. "Are you going to charge the Director overtime? What will you bill it as? Probationary Head Shrinking? Gibbs' Psych-Slaps?" She yawned. "Considering the hours I keep these days you should put in for time-and-a-half."

Was that an agreement?

"Was that a yes?"

They were sitting close enough for him to feel her eye roll. "Yes, Gibbs, alright. I will . . . " she made a face, "wake you."

He relaxed, finally, thankfully.

They weren't on a rooftop. Ziva didn't have a gun in her hand. But he wondered if it wouldn't just have been a matter of time. He had seen with his own eyes what this kind of pain could do to a person. A minute shudder moved through his body and he released a long breath, letting the tension that had him wired for the last few hours shake free.

Ziva looked at him quickly, startled.

He withdrew from her space, releasing her hand and rising to his feet in one movement to step away, onto the grass.

"Well that's good, David. About _sixteen months late_, but nice of you to finally get with the program."

She popped to her feet at the return of his usual daytime cheer. They looked at each other for a moment, and then she smiled at him.

He let himself smile back. Then wiped it off his face theatrically.

"Think you better hurry if you want to get to work on time. Your boss is a bastard and you've got," he checked his watch. "Four minutes."

She laughed, tired but light, and spun on her heel, heading determinedly toward her car. "Yes, Gibbs."

"Have a good day, Ziva," he grinned at her retreating back.

"On it, Gibbs!" Her voice rang out clear and strong. She hopped into the Mini and gunned the motor, peeling out a second later with a little shriek of wheels and smoking tires.

Yep. Definitely his Ziva.

Gibbs stretched and yawned, shaking out his knee and turning in a lazy circle on the grass. The sun was just peaking through the leaves of the trees. It felt good.

He turned back to the house and looked at the front porch. He used to sit on those steps to keep an eye on Kelly. When she was riding her bike or playing in the front yard. He hadn't sat out here in a long time, but Ziva was right. It was a nice spot.

He climbed the few steps up to the front door slowly, eyeing them for likely places to set his clamps. His projects were smaller these days. Maybe he'd bring a few upstairs.

**x x x x x x x **

That day Gibbs went into work and drank enough coffee to give Ducky a heart attack.

Vance was as determined as ever to be miserable, just like he'd been every day since he got out of the hospital. Gibbs was desperate, as he'd been every day for just as long, to give his Director the head slap of the century.

McGee was brilliant, as usual, and as usual spouted enough techno crap to give Gibbs an aneurism.

Dinozzo was his right hand, as he'd been for a long time. But he also stared at Barrett and bickered with Ziva and generally made Gibbs want to shoot something. Or someone.

Ziva acted the same as she always had, steady as a rock, so he shoved the night before into hiding and treated her just the same as he always did.

He went home only slightly earlier than usual and collapsed into bed to sleep like the dead until daybreak. When he got up he felt fantastic. Nothing beat a good night's sleep. He took a quick shower and jogged downstairs only to freeze on his way to the kitchen.

There was a pound bag of coffee beans sitting in the middle of his dining room table. It was the good stuff, from the coffee place near the Navy Yard. In front of the coffee there was a white cardboard box.

He frowned, considered it suspiciously. It was the kind of box that his ex's would give him for Christmas, when they were still his wives. There were always dress shirts inside.

He approached, opened it slowly.

It wasn't a dress shirt.

He reached out to run a finger over a loop. The leather was soft and thick, studded with adjustable straps and pockets perfectly sized to hold his finer tools. He lifted it from the box and ran his hands down the length of it, admiring the weight and craftsmanship.

It was a really nice belt.

Gibbs was thoughtful as he trotted down the basement stairs to set the box and its contents on his workbench. Gifts were given at the end of something. To say thank you, or maybe to recognize an accomplishment.

But he hadn't come to the end of anything with Ziva. They'd barely scratched the surface.

She'd said she would call, admitted she couldn't handle it on her own. He knew it had been a hard thing to say. But it would be a much harder thing to actually do. He couldn't help feeling a little niggle of worry that she hadn't, really, meant it.


	2. Lost Night

**Chapter 2: Lost Night  
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_A/N: An interlude for Ziva . . .  
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The best thing about driving in Washington was the circles. There were traffic circles everywhere, and they were fun.

At first, when she was new to the city, the circles were infuriating. Other drivers inevitably got in her way and forced her to slow down. But one morning when she was running late, Ziva had been thrilled to discover a little trick. If you negotiated the roundabouts properly you could actually _accelerate_ through them.

You just had to be comfortable speeding up while everyone around you was slowing down. Ziva was.

Ziva realized that urban planners wanted people to slow down, even stop, at traffic circles. But as long as you entered the circle going significantly faster than any of the cars already in it, you couldn't cut them off. And that meant you had the right-of-way. Technically. Didn't you?

Yes. You just had to be good at dodging other vehicles. And immune to car horns.

Ziva definitely was.

At night, when normal people were in bed, she could really drive fast. Then she would feel the pull of the wheels as she forced them to extremes. The g-force lifting her body as she whipped around a tight curve. Best of all the sudden speed rocking the car as she gunned the engine, peeling out of a loop to fly down one of its spokes. It was all extremely . . . satisfying.

Navigating roads at breakneck speed was an excellent way to evade or outrun enemies, that was true. But Ziva had found these weren't the only advantages to moving fast. Aggressive driving also offered a great sense of control, as long as the driver managed not to crash into anything.

There were no circles on the way to Gibbs' house, so she sought them out. She went through her favorite series of loops many times before she would turn in his direction.

It took time for the hum of the engine and the motions of driving to work. But the focus it required, if she was moving fast enough, could push everything else away.

She didn't need it every night, thank god. But when she did, and when it worked, for awhile at least there was nothing but the car and the road and the beautiful blur of the world going by.

Sometimes driving worked so well that she didn't end up at his house at all. Those nights she actually managed to outrun the enemies in her own head. Eventually she would climb out of the car to sit in a park or a coffee shop for a bit, her mind floating peacefully, watching the city wake up. She always went home just in time to get ready for work, and at work she was always fine.

And then there were the nights she lost. When retreating to her car didn't fix a thing. The sensation that came over her as she worked the familiar gears and turned the wheel was not of gaining control.

Those nights, in her own head and on the road, things came at her too fast. She didn't react right, didn't think right. She was _stuck_. She was _falling_. Speeding up didn't help. Slowing down was worse. Everything was slipping out of her grasp, flying apart . . . out of control.

And that was intolerable. If you lost control at the speed Ziva maintained you were only a moment away from slamming into a wall.

More and more often, lately, her mind resisted the tricks she'd developed to soothe it. It felt like the wall was a split-second away.

Nights like tonight.

Ziva finally whipped out of Dupont and headed down the wide avenue that would take her to Gibbs'. She hadn't been by his house since that night, weeks ago, when he'd found her on his front step. She was driving around anyway . . . she might as well drive by.

Maybe he would be up, and she would go in, and they would sit and be easy together. She wished that she could do that. And that when they talked it would be about something ordinary and relaxing and _real –_ real to normal people, the stuff of a normal life. Like baseball, or woodworking, even office gossip.

She would grab at anything to fill her mind, anything that would take her away from the grotesque visions chasing through her head. Violence and pain and the ugliness that only hate can create in a man – she had thought about those things enough for one lifetime. Enough for ten lifetimes.

She hadn't cruised down the avenue that would take her to Gibbs for more than a minute before her path was blocked by a red light.

Ziva always waited until the last possible moment to stomp on the brake. She was thrown forward of course, the car slowing significantly faster than her body.

But the belt caught her by the shoulder, as it always did, and heaved her violently back into the seat. That was satisfying, too.

Red lights were difficult. There was nothing to do but wait, and thoughts could creep up on you. Unfortunately there was no way to get to Gibbs' house without going through traffic lights. She had checked.

In the sudden stillness Ziva tapped her fingers on the wheel and studied the shadowy landmarks on the block in front of her. There was something crawling up her back.

She willed her shoulders not to tense – they were already sore.

When the light turned green, she decided, she would count the seconds until she got to the next street. Perform a personal calculation of her acceleration. She focused on the light and nothing else, ready to move the instant it changed.

But her mind wouldn't focus like she told it to. She could feel an unease coming over her that had nothing to do with red and green lights. Someone was breathing on her neck.

Her shoulders turned to rock.

The light flicked to green and the Mini roared down the street. She didn't do any calculations. Her acceleration was as fast as she could make it.

Her colleagues in Mossad used to say Ziva had missed her calling, that she should have been a pilot, a fighter jock.

At the time she had scoffed. Pilots were removed, cool, literally aloof.

Ziva's anger at the people who killed her sister had always burned hot.

She threw the car into third gear and flew around a corner. His neighborhood was coming up fast.

When the targets responsible for her sister's death and every last one of their connections were dead, her anger hadn't cooled. She'd simply found more targets. Her rage expanded to include anyone like them, and there was nothing she wanted to do more in life than hunt them down.

But not from up in the clouds. She smiled grimly at her dark windshield. That would not have been satisfying.

She wanted to be close when she and her team finally caught the suspects they so carefully pursued. She needed to be on the ground, in the room. And she wanted to _stay_ close. To put uncertainty in their eyes and revel in it, to feel them cower beneath her gun, under her hands.

She smashed down the brake and shrieked to a halt at a stop sign. Residential neighborhoods were all infested with stop signs.

She used to daydream about it. Smelling their fear, watching them squirm. Making them beg.

It made her a very good operative.

How ironic, then, that she saw them and smelled them and felt them so easily now. All she had to do was wait for a night like this, and close her eyes.

Her work was her calling, a part of who she was. And yet there were times now when she thought she would give it all up, give anything at all, to be like a pilot. Clean, up in the sky. Never seeing the faces of her enemies, never touching them.

She drove down his street slowly and pulled up to the curb, her car moving at an uncharacteristic creep. She was always careful to drive cautiously as she approached his house. She didn't want to wake Gibbs with squealing tires, and anyway, she was pretty certain that annoying his neighbors would annoy him, too.

She sat in the dark for a moment, listening to the silence.

Smoothed down her hair. Scratched her neck.

That talk had changed things. Ziva didn't want to get out of the car. She'd never really wanted to, even before. She wasn't a pilot – she was tethered to the ground, and nothing in her world offered more control than the driver's seat of a car.

Then again, just sitting here wasn't good. Something was pressing at her throat now. It was rope, rough, tearing the skin . . .

Ziva touched her neck again but managed to resist the urge to turn around, to check behind her. If she gave into that impulse the urge to turn and check would overwhelm her for hours.

It was an infuriating weakness. Ziva, the unbeatable ninja chick, defeated by imaginary men. But she couldn't seem to stop.

That was how she used to end up on Gibbs' steps. The faceless men behind her. It didn't matter if Gibbs was unconscious, having him at her back was reassuring. Helped her keep some control even when driving offered none.

But climbing those steps tonight . . . her whole being shrank from it. The rope and the men weren't real, no matter how hard her mind – traitor that it was – worked to convince her of them. Those ghosts would fade eventually.

But the decision to get out of the car – that was real. If she went up the steps she would have to call Gibbs. Calling him would be admitting defeat. More than that. It would be an annihilation. Ziva didn't _do_ defeat. In a fight against imaginary men, no less. She huffed.

Monsters under the bed. It was all so ridiculous.

Fingers were moving through her hair. Pulling, taunting. She breathed deeply. Shoved her shoulders back.

This was stupid. She needed to decide, get out or drive off. Her watch read 4:14. Gibbs' house was dark, of course.

It was only a few more hours until she was due at work.

And it was Friday. There was a kickboxing class with an excellent instructor every Friday at 0600, not far from the Navy Yard.

The hands on her neck were beginning to squeeze. She closed her eyes tight.

_No_. There was nothing behind her. Ziva gripped the steering wheel tight.

There was one thing she could still control. Only one thing left to lose.

Would she fight, or not? Was she still the same person, or was that all gone?

She wouldn't get out. She _wouldn't_.

She would go to the gym at six. Sweat, and feel real pain, and kick real things – maybe even spar with the instructor and land a few kicks on _him_. That would be satisfying.

And it was how Ziva had solved many problems in the past. By beating them into submission. It had worked before, it could work again. She was still the same person. She was still _strong._ Gibbs had said so. _You're not weak_, he'd said. She just needed to ride this rough patch out.

The class started in less than two hours. She could handle anything for two hours. Couldn't she?

Yes. She could. She had. She was trained to endure, and now she would endure a little more.

She set her hand on the ignition but hesitated at the last moment, her eyes drawn to the dark porch. She had promised Gibbs she would call . . .

But she didn't really need to, tonight. Not really.

She would make it through the next few hours, until work. At work all this ugliness would fade away. It always did.

Ziva started the engine and drove quietly down the street, forcing herself not to go too fast until she'd left his block.

It was getting harder, harder and harder. She reminded herself that she had been through difficult things in the past. Devastating things. Losses that might have broken someone who wasn't as strong as Ziva.

But she _was_ Ziva. She was strong. Always.

She'd give up on the circles for the moment, they weren't really holding her attention tonight. She decided to head to Georgetown instead. Those twisty little streets might be fun.

**x x x x x x x**

Ziva checked the requisition form twice, but found no mistakes. Finally she emailed it to the director's assistant.

When she was younger she was able to channel her rage into work, into her training and her missions.

The same was true now, even if the problem wasn't rage. The irrational thoughts that sometimes kept her up at night would blessedly disappear under the bright lights of the squad room, buried by the hum of the office and familiar tasks.

She went to kickboxing. She had come to work. She was herself again. It had been a perfectly ordinary day and she would probably be able to sleep just fine tonight. She was tired, but tired was nothing. She was okay.

And a good thing, too. Gibbs had been studying her for the past few days, and made no secret of it.

Once he had simply searched her face, saying nothing. He didn't stop when Ziva caught him at it, just went on searching.

One evening she had turned down an invitation to drinks with Abby. She'd just been too tired. When Ziva left for home a few minutes later he'd caught her eye as she rose from her desk. He had given her a long, blatant, _I'm on to you_ Gibbs stare, even turning his head to watch her as she walked out. His eyes followed her all the way to the elevator.

Just yesterday she caught him at it again, and still he hadn't looked away. But the gaze had shifted a little. It was even more brazen, and patient too, an _I know and I know you know I know and I'm waiting _stare.

Ziva didn't worry too much about the looks. He was just rattled from the night that she fell apart at his house. Gibbs didn't take his responsibilities as team leader lightly and he was doing his job, making sure she was okay, making sure she was fit for duty. Ziva knew she was, so that was fine by her.

The day crawled. She drank a lot of tea. The boys' antics got louder as the afternoon wore on; they obviously looked forward to leaving. Ziva usually did too, when she had plans and especially when she was still with Ray. They both liked to cook and they would talk in the evenings, their phones on speaker as they chopped vegetables and sauteed garlic, hundreds of miles away but sharing their days.

She didn't have plans for tonight, other than catching up on sleep.

There were no more forms to fill out for the week. Ziva surveyed her pristine desk. Nothing to do there. She decided to check her bookmarked webpages for updates.

Three hours later she had reviewed the most wanted lists of the major agencies around the world and was reading background material on what appeared to be a new extremist group. One of the more prominent members was from Baltimore and she studied his face to commit it to memory.

She was only distantly aware of Gibbs' desk lamp switching off, didn't really notice him moving until he'd stopped in front of her desk.

She looked up and glanced around the office in surprise. It was empty. She flicked her eyes to Tony and McGee's desks. Vacant and dark.

Well, she'd been absorbed in her work. Her gaze finally swung up to her boss expectantly.

But Gibbs wasn't looking at her. He was studying the almost empty coffee cup in his hand, swirling the dregs and watching them settle.

He looked like he was debating something.

"Gibbs?"

He ignored her, swirled his coffee again.

She straightened and waited. Her shoulders weren't noticeably sore now. Everything was sore after kickboxing.

Finally he let the cup still.

"Thought you were going to call me." Gibbs' voice was quiet but the tone was . . . hard.

Ziva blinked.

Had she not shaken off the tiredness as well as she thought? He knew to look for it now, of course. But she'd been sure it hadn't affected her work.

"I –," she looked over at his desk. "Did I make an error?"

She thought quickly back to everything she had done in the last week, wondered if she forgot to complete something.

"I'm not talking about the job, Ziva. I'm talking about you."

He was studying that coffee like it was a suspect.

Ziva was relieved despite the tone. "But I have not needed to," she reassured him. "I am alright."

He looked up at her then, turning his attention away from the cup he held only slowly. It looked strange. He didn't usually do things slowly.

She held her breath, waiting for him to respond, but it seemed to take a long time. His eyes moved over her face like blue spotlights.

"You're lying," he said finally.

She opened her mouth to deny it, but the words wouldn't come. She could only stare back at him.

The look in his eyes was unreadable. The silence between them grew, pressed in on them.

Then Gibbs shook his head, threw the coffee cup into her waste bin and walked stiffly away.

Ziva stared at the surface of her desk as the elevator doors whisked closed and carried him away. She breathed evenly, tried to calm her mind. But it was racing.

This team was everything to her now, the start of a new life. But to Gibbs, _trust_ was everything. She could not afford to lose his. She didn't want to.

Ziva sat there, alone in the office, for a long time.


	3. Calling

**AN: **Thanks for the reviews! And thanks in particular to rebecca-in-blue's beta-esque wondering. This chapter duly revised. Also, spoilers below for Season 3, Episode 7, _Honor Code_.**  
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**Chapter Three: Calling**

**x x x x x x **

_**Ziva: **They worked for a warlord as specialists._

_**McGee: **What specialty?_

_**Ziva: **Coercion._

_**Gibbs: **. . . Torture._

**From _NCIS: Honor Code_**

**x x x x x x **

Something was ringing far away. Coming closer. Close.

Gibbs lurched up from the deep and rolled over to pick up the phone on autopilot, not bothering to check the Caller ID.

In the dead of night it was always dispatch. A clipped cool voice carrying some new tale of woe.

"Yeah, Gibbs."

He waited for it. A dead body, this time? A missing person?

Gibbs had come to understand dispatch as a great black stork, delivering treachery and pain and loss. Every case was just like the one before it and every case was unique, like tiny bloody fingerprints, each was horrifying in its own way.

He should hate these calls. But the truth was he loved them. It wasn't the warm, light love shared by families and friends, no. He loved these calls like a wounded man loves morphine, mindlessly and privately, with no regard to the destruction it might wreck on a liver or a marriage or a life. He loved them like a body heals - with pain, of necessity. A love born of need.

The trouble was that he knew too much. Horror and pain and loss were out there, happening, and Gibbs _knew_. He understood it in a way that would never leave him, in a way that once nearly crushed him. It was the job that taught him how to carve a path through that dark knowledge, sure and methodical and patient as a blade carving through hard wood. He'd learned to Deal. Even, on the better days, to wrench back a little good for some other family. Bittersweet victories, every one.

Three wives had lain beside Gibbs and never once found in him the steadfast devotion that he offered so effortlessly to dispatch. Though he wasn't getting much in return at the moment. The line was silent.

"Gibbs. Go ahead."

Nothing. He rubbed his eyes. Dispatch was patchy sometimes, but he didn't hear any static.

"_Hello._"

Silence.

Gibbs lifted the phone away from his ear to peer at the ID. It wasn't dispatch.

He sat up and cleared his throat. "You here?"

"Yes."

"Be right down." He shut the phone and swung his legs out of bed, shaking his head to get rid of the fog. The glowing face of the cell was bright. Too bright.

4:17

He'd gone to bed two hours ago and his body was telling him pretty firmly that it wasn't nearly long enough. Gibbs got up to splash water on his face and pull on some clothes. Even through the fuzz of waking he could feel his relief. She'd called. She'd come to him, finally. That was one hurdle down.

A slight feeling of foreboding hit him just as he headed downstairs, the wood of the floors cool under his feet, the whisper of dread a perfect counterpoint to his relief. The key thing about dispatch was that it was almost always strangers. It was the job, it had rules, and Gibbs understood it. He did it methodically and well.

Tonight wasn't about a stranger, though, or the job, and he knew no rules for this.

At 4:21 Gibbs opened the door to his house, eyes landing expectantly on the front step.

It was empty. Really empty. Gibbs' grip on the door tightened, his knuckles creaking as his eyes scanned the lawn and found nothing.

_No . . ._

An entire, fat, silent second passed before he spotted her car. It was pulled into the driveway and half-hidden by his own. Gibbs felt his grip relax and took another second out to scold himself. Now who was jumpy?

And where the hell was Ziva?

That was a mystery that solved itself. When Gibbs moved outside to look around he almost stepped on her. Ziva was sitting on the floor practically under his feet, her legs folded up, her back propped against the front of the house. He only happened to see her when he looked directly down.

She hadn't so much as twitched to acknowledge him. Of course, stillness is an excellent tactic if you want to hide, and looking at her it was plain to see that she absolutely did.

Ziva wasn't jumpy tonight. More . . . coiled.

He sighed. That first night he'd had the element of surprise on his side. It would be harder now. Gibbs sent up a prayer that all of his body parts would remain in their assigned places for the duration of the evening.

"You want to come in?"

"No."

Hiding, dangerous, and monosyllabic. Yeah, this ought to go well.

Gibbs reached up to comb his fingers through his hair. It felt like it was sticking up.

"Give me a minute." He withdrew into the house, stuttered to a halt just as he cleared the door, and poked his head back out to add a mild, "You better be here when I get back."

He left the door open a crack and went to the kitchen to retrieve the coffee he'd started brewing. He'd need it if he was laying in for some sort of silent siege. Given the state of Ziva's walls Gibbs was pretty sure he'd wish soon enough that he'd skipped the coffee for stronger stuff. Not that it was an option when they both needed to be at work in a few hours.

He folded his arms and stared at the coffee maker as it hissed out the last of the pot. Gibbs decided then and there that a good goal for the conversation to follow would be getting her to show up next time at a more reasonable hour. For bourbon.

When he stepped out again he set a mug by her knee, eyed the floor of the porch critically, and dragged one of the rocking chairs out from the corner. He didn't bring it too close and only turned it toward her a bit, content to look more toward the yard than his agent. No one curled up that small wanted to be looked at.

"I don't –" she sniffed the mug. Then warily, "Tea?"

Gibbs managed to settle into the swaying chair without slopping coffee on himself.

"Yep. Ducky gave it to me last time I got knocked on the head." Some mysteries were eternal. What did Duck think he was going to do with herbal tea? Gibbs had blown a good layer of dust off the box before fishing out a bag for Ziva. He'd thought he would end up using that tea for kindling.

She cradled the mug in her hands and blew across the top.

Minutes passed and the tea in her hands lost its heat. Ziva was uncomfortable. But that was preferable to being paralyzed with embarrassment and self-loathing, which would certainly be the case if she were actually to attempt "Talking" to Gibbs.

There was little risk of that, though, because she had nothing to say. Ziva's mind was dark like a building on lockdown. Her throat felt like a deadbolt had been thrown across it. Only that faint crawling feeling remained.

Gibbs sat quietly, sipping from his mug. He didn't seem expectant now. He was just . . . there. That was fine with Ziva - he was the one who insisted she call. The least he could do was be quiet. Even if it was his house, this porch was her _one_ remaining peace, her one spot to run. To hide. With Gibbs' invasion it wouldn't be so peaceful, or so dark.

Ziva could deal most of the time, but of course, that didn't satisfy Gibbs. He insisted on shining a light on her precisely when she was in this . . . low place. And it wasn't helping. She was like some fragile, ugly bug now, wasn't she? Ziva sneered at herself. Running. Skittering away from the flashlight's beam in the night.

Once she had been strong, all the time. _Ziva, full of fire_, that's what they called her. But that was _before_. Before her mind had become its own minefield. Before nights like this one, when she ran as fast as she could, and sought out dark places to hide. Like a wounded thing. Once she could rely on her strength, on herself. What did she have now?

She felt the weight of eyes on her from the chair where he sat. Ziva ground her teeth. Now, like a victim or a child, she had _Nice Gibbs_.

Ten minutes passed in silence. One look at Ziva and Gibbs could tell that the "soothing" claim on that box of tea was way overrated. He'd already drained the last of his cup and set it on the floor. They had to start somewhere. Might as well get the inane out of the way.

"Been awhile."

Ziva sighed. She could sigh very expressively, say lots of things with a little bit of breath. This was a _Really? Must we? _sort of exhalation.

When she glanced over he was no longer looking at the lawn. He was looking at her. Gibbs could communicate a lot with a stare and this was the familiar _Yeah, you must._

Ziva thought mutinously that she ought to give him a little of his own medicine. The mute treatment.

On the other hand she'd been unable to look Gibbs in the eye for weeks. Not since he accused her of lying to him.

Before she called Ziva had managed to convince herself that fixing this, fixing it _tonight_, would be worth the few words it would take. So she took a breath, mentally gagging past the reluctance to say anything at all, and spoke.

"I did not mean to lie to you, Gibbs."

"I know."

"I did not think I _was_ lying to you." Her voice was harsh.

"Yeah," he said slowly. "I know that."

"I do not want to talk."

The corner of his mouth went up in a faint, humorless grin. "No kidding."

Ziva turned the mug around in her hands. Set it down to trace its rim. Picked it back up.

Gibbs watched her from the corner of his eye. His back had relaxed perfectly into the cradling chair and his legs stretched in front of him lazily, about as far from her hair-trigger tension as it was possible to be.

"Been up all night, Ziva?"

She gave him a jerky sort of half-nod.

Well, with the apology out of the way they were regressing from monosyllabic, and fast. It was expressive for a nod though, he'd give her that. She'd clearly said both "Yes" and also "Would you please fuck-off?"

He was beginning to get a sense of why she hadn't hashed this out with a therapist or one of the NCIS counsellors.

She was as useless at this stuff as he was.

Oh, she put up a good front. Shared her opinions freely enough. Would talk your ears clean off on the job, when she was explaining why she was right and you were wrong. Mixed it up with Dinozzo like a pro. But anything vulnerable was buried deep. Well, as deep as Ziva could get it to go on a night like this one.

"Been here long?" he asked easily.

She shook her head.

As the silence settled around them again she felt a little flash of shame throw its heat across her face. Ziva knew he should send her home. This wasn't his job. Gibbs should go back to bed, make a note to recommend her for a most thorough psych eval first thing in the morning, and sleep the sleep of the righteous.

He had done far more for her in the past few years than anyone ever before in her life. She owed the man an eternity of favors. Now he sat beside her in the middle of the night, patient in his rocking chair. As if he didn't have anything better to do at four in the morning.

Which was crap of course - they worked too hard to want to do anything but sleep at such an hour.

She pushed at her mind, at the darkness that seemed to crush it on nights like this, and reached for some kind of courtesy. It was usually automatic for her superiors, engrained from the time she was young.

Giving words to Gibbs now . . . it felt like he was reaching into her head and pulling them like teeth.

"Half an hour," she finally said.

He made a show of checking his watch. The fact that he wasn't wearing one only made the gesture more effective. "What'd you do before that?"

Silence.

Gibbs stepped in to fill it before it got too strained. Of course he knew what she'd been doing. She'd told him what she did to cope the last time she was here.

"Been driving around?" He said it quietly, and so lightly, like he was asking if she'd like pancakes on some sleepy, sunny Sunday morning.

Stepping carefully around the live wires. He didn't know what this current bomb was made of, exactly, but he sure as hell knew it was there. It was closer to the surface than it had been since the day Michael Rivkin died.

That hadn't ended well. She'd been so far gone, so lost in a well of rage . . . He felt his hands tightening a little. Her home blowing up hadn't even registered as a blip on her radar. The last time Ziva was wired like this she'd ditched the team and her life in DC for her disaster of a father and a suicide mission.

He was really hoping to diffuse things more successfully this go around.

As it turned out she hadn't been driving _around._ Not exactly.

She slid her eyes sideways to consider him, then off to the shadowy trees again. "Yes, I drove." She picked at her sleeve. "To West Virginia."

Gibbs leaned forward a bit to peer down at her. "Seriously?"

Ziva nodded, actually looking up through the shadows to give him a fierce, mischievous little smile. "The mountain roads are fun."

"Uh huh." Gibbs rubbed his forehead.

God. He could just picture it.

The red Mini flying down hills, charging around hairpin turns. Wheels screeching, car pushed past its limits. Maybe she'd send it skidding through a curve to wrap around a tree. Or smash it in a collision on a narrow road. The more spectacular, the more Ziva. Yeah, he could see it alright. On fire at the bottom of a ravine.

Fun.

There were no suicide missions available at NCIS, not on Gibbs' team at any rate. But that didn't mean Ziva couldn't cook up a good one on her own time. Was she doing that? Tearing around in her car at night and flirting with death? Or was she just blowing off steam? Ziva was probably too used to the thrill of danger to recognize the difference.

Gibbs looked at her, huddled in the shadows of his porch, and for a moment he felt strangely small. Small like a man standing on a beach, watching the hurricane come.

People who didn't know better would discount the mind like they discounted the air around them. They didn't understand how mere memories could fuck you up until they _did. _Just like no one who hadn't seen it really understood the power that thin air held over them. How it could tear the roof right off your house, reach in and suck your children out if it wanted to, if it was moving fast enough. These were things you understood only after they'd come for you.

Where exactly Ziva was in all of that he didn't know. How far were those wheels tilting up off the road?

Gibbs rubbed his stubbly chin. If he didn't already have gray hair . . . Course worryworting it now was beyond useless. He needed to get off this train of thought.

Gibbs wondered idly if Kelly would have been a fast driver, like Ziva. He grinned a little. Who was he kidding? Kelly always went after things full tilt, just like him. She'd have been a terror on the road. He never watched her drive off on her own. But if he had he probably would've pictured all sorts of disasters.

Gibbs looked across the lawn, where she'd played. Where she'd stood that day when he drove away. At the red car in the driveway.

There was a shift then. Gibbs blinked. The cuts on his face stung faintly in the sunlight. Familiar cracks appeared all around him. Cold terror crept up his spine.

It was the windshield, smeared with blood. Her blood . . .

Gibbs shook his head firmly and shoved that away, gripping the arms of the chair and clawing his way back to the calm night.

It was balmy, summertime now. Just this side of sticky. He was talking to his agent, who was doing a credible impression of a stick of dynamite but was otherwise safe at his side. Gibbs sat quietly for a minute, calming himself as he studied her car.

That hadn't happened in awhile.

Ziva once called him the closest thing she had to a father. He'd tried not to think about that too much. She was an agent. She worked for him. She'd been an assassin once, for god's sake, she could take care of herself.

But now she was hurting, and she'd said what she said, and it was getting to him. Kelly was dust now, except in his memories. Still that part of him that was a father refused to die.

"West Virginia, huh? You must be . . ."

Gibbs squinted toward the street.

Ziva waited for his assessment. Tired? Restless? Unhinged?

" . . . burning a lot of gas. You get good milage in that thing?"

Ziva huffed and grinned against her will. Gibbs was a genius at this, she had to admit. She'd known that all along, of course, it just hadn't occurred to her that he would . . . _let_ her drift. It was kind of him.

This wasn't quite the Talk she'd been dreading when she called. Gibbs was offering her distractions, and damn good ones.

"Not really. I go too fast to burn fuel efficiently."

"Yeah. Thought you might."

Gibbs sat forward and put his elbows on his knees. Picked his mug up off the floor and turned it in his hands. She was talking, at least, though he was beginning to think he'd need more than coffee to get through this on an even keel. Like the World War I boys, he thought wryly, knocking back rations of rum before going up over the wall, into No Man's Land.

Ziva watched him out of the corner of her eye. Now _he_ looked . . . somewhat . . . tense, though she couldn't fathom why.

Had she ruined his night, on top of her own? This _really_ wasn't his problem. What was he doing out here? Why didn't he let her sit here on her own, or just send her on her way? She groped for normal.

"Have you ever been there?" she asked. "It is very beautiful."

"Yeah." Gibbs loosed his grip on the mug and allowed his body to settle into the chair again. "Used to go camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains."

His body relaxed but his voice was strained. It was subtle, but Ziva had worked with him for years. She could recognize it. This was something to do with his family, she supposed. Somehow she had reminded him of them.

She was quiet, considering that. Gibbs' vulnerability . . . he showed it, sometimes. Not very often. Well. Rarely. But when it did show it wasn't eating him alive. He didn't run from it, didn't hide. He had made his peace with it, somehow made his vulnerability into _strength_. He would mention the family he lost to someone who was grieving and it would build a connection, let them know they weren't alone.

He used it too, she knew, when he was pushing the team to work harder, to go farther on behalf of a victim. It helped him, but it didn't drive him. He drove _himself_. He was in control.

He was using it now, with her. She knew he could hide it well enough if he really wanted to. But he'd let her see it.

Ziva looked up to watch a pale moth flutter out of the dark and tap against the warm yellow window of Gibbs' living room.

She'd thought she was in control for a long time. She'd thought she'd understood herself, understood what she was doing with her life. But she could see now she'd been wrong, long before Somalia. Fooling herself.

Ziva wasn't sure if she could express this in words, but she thought, suddenly, that she might want to try. If anyone had a hope of understanding her closetful of ghosts it would be the man sitting on this porch.

"Gibbs," she said abruptly. "Do you remember Laura Osgood?"

He looked up at that, surprised. Something had changed. Ziva was no longer quite the powder keg she'd been a minute ago.

"Sounds familiar."

"She was involved in the kidnapping of a Commander."

Ah.

"Yeah," he said. "I remember her." And he knew where this was going.

He pinned Ziva with his gaze and waited for her to say it.

"I . . . _interviewed_ her. You let me do it."

Well that was blunt. Gibbs was very still. "You barely touched her."

Ziva jerked her head, a violent _What does that matter?_ It looked like a scream trapped in a box.

Gibbs didn't move, but then, he never did when he was startled. He hadn't thought this part of her past was a real problem. He'd take that back about the powder keg. She was all over the place.

They were quiet.

"My sister was killed just before I completed my basic training. After her death . . . I was . . . " Ziva paused. There were no words to express it.

He would understand, though.

"I was full of rage, consumed by it. And that sounds so simple. But it wasn't . . . " Again she cast about for the right words, but there were none. Ziva looked at him a little helplessly. "This is why talking is so useless," she said. "There is no word to describe it, not in any of the languages I speak."

He smiled faintly and looked down at the empty mug wrapped up in his hands. "Think I know what you mean," he said. "About talking . . . and about revenge."

"Yes, revenge." Her voice was a thousand miles away.

Gibbs eyed her.

"The . . . anger burned up everything else, all that was left was revenge. I wanted it, of course." Her eyes wandered to his and then away again. "I volunteered for Mossad. Threw myself into training. Whatever got results, that was what I pursued."

He nodded, looking at her steadily.

She looked back, but couldn't say it. "Then there are times when the words are obvious," she murmured. "But too terrible to speak."

He waited, but the quiet between them just grew.

Gibbs used his toes to rock back in the chair a bit and hoped that what he was about to say was true. He didn't know a lot of the details of what she'd done for Mossad. "They're not, Ziva."

"They are. It is." She watched him calmly, her back firm and straight now against the house. She had taken the darkness in her mind for nothingness, but that wasn't true. There was all of this, even if it was black on black. "You don't know what I have done, Gibbs. But I understand it now. I know better than most."

He was silent, watching her eyes, following her hands as they toyed with the mug.

"It is a very neat . . . circle, is it not? After Tali died I learned _interrogation_. There's a word. I was very good at it. I learned _coercion_," she said harshly. "But I know you do not approve of that one, Gibbs. It is a . . . what is the expression? A copper?"

He looked away from her, out across the lawn. He'd seen enough.

"Copout," he said softly.

"Yes!" she smiled triumphantly, coldly. "A copout."

_Goddamn._ She had relaxed a bit, a minute ago, but that was gone as if it had never been. She was drawn up tightly now, her eyes glittering in the faint light like sparks.

"We did not like the real word, so we used others. But I will not be afraid of a word. Torture, that is what I learned." She picked up the mug of cold tea and drank thirstily.

Gibbs was quiet, his eyes fixed on the dark street. He remembered standing with McGee in a plush lobby. Ziva had been locked in a room, convincing Laura Osgood to reveal all her treacherous secrets. They'd needed that information and Gibbs hadn't had the luxury of caring what Ziva did to get it.

But he hadn't stayed to watch, either. He knew it would be ugly. Gibbs had taken a wide-eyed McGee and beat a hasty retreat. Y_ou don't want to know_, he'd told Tim.

Gibbs hadn't wanted to know. Hadn't even wanted to look at the petrified woman after Ziva was done with her. He'd just walked back into the room and listened as Osgood choked out the answers they needed. At the time Ziva looked like she cared less about the methods used. The tactics were worth it, Gibbs was sure of that. With the information from Osgood they'd found the kidnapped man. Ziva had saved his life . . .

But Gibbs left her to do the dirty work alone, and now his skin began to crawl. It wasn't lost on him that her own father had done the same.

"It was all very useful. I was so good at it, after all. But you know, I have always found that when you enjoy something it is much easier to excel. Don't you agree, Gibbs?"

He'd set his chin in his hand and wouldn't look at her.

"And we had a director, this fabulous director, who really did not care about anything at all except results. Completing our missions, _at any cost_, that is what he cared about. You know, I don't think I technically broke any laws," she chucked, a low sound. "Of course it was convenient to operate in countries with very few laws to begin with. The suspects under my control were not so lucky – them, I broke."

She set the mug down hard, as far from her as she could reach. It was that or throw it like a child having a tantrum. Well, she sneered, maybe that wasn't too far off the truth.

_I know this face. You made the same one when I told my brother he could not buy you a pony . . ._

"I was very good at everything I learned, Gibbs. But I wasn't the best. Do you know who was the best?"

Gibbs continued to look out at the night. She could see he was listening, though. He was hearing her and she was spilling her revolting past, vomiting it up on his shoes. Well, he was the one who insisted she call.

"Of course you do. You are Gibbs."

She paused, but he was still. So she announced it herself. "_Ari_ was the best."

Finally he glanced at her. Said neutrally, "You aren't Ari."

She laughed. "No. I am more like my father than he ever was."

"You said yourself, you didn't commit any crimes, Ziva –"

"What do I care about _crimes_? What do crimes have to do with right and wrong? With evil?" She studied him solemnly. "Laws mean nothing. There are loopholes through all of them, if you know how to find them. And we do, do we not?"

She continued, not about to wait for an answer he would never give.

"The wrongs that I have committed, the suffering I caused – I am paying for that now." Her voice was calm again and she lapsed into silence, apparently satisfied. Apparently done.

Gibbs gave her a long, close look, one usually reserved for some new suspect in interrogation. The bug under the microscope stare. Which made it rather appropriate, Ziva supposed. _I am looking into your soul_, it said. And also, _This is your soul? How unfortunate for you_.

They weren't getting anywhere. Ziva looked exactly as she had when he first stepped onto the porch tonight. Gibbs thought he might have to settle for a controlled detonation. Trying to calm her down hadn't worked, and sure as hell she couldn't leave like this.

"I don't think so," he offered. He was good at dismissive. Had a lot of practice with various Directors over the years.

"No?" Ziva was suddenly very tired and clearly, utterly disinterested in Gibbs' thinking.

"Nope." He shrugged. "You want to call what you're feeling guilt. Fine. Maybe that feels a little better. If you're the one to blame then you were the one pulling the strings, right?"

Ziva just looked at him, confused.

"But that's a lie, Ziva." He tipped his mug and studied the bottom. Wished for a bottle of bourbon. "It's not guilt."

"But I did –"

"I don't care what you think you did," he flicked his fingers lazily. "I know who you are. Don't feed me bullshit cliches, Ziva. Don't feed them to yourself. You know better than that."

He rested his elbows on the arms of the chair, totally relaxed. Scornfully so. "It's not guilt."

She stared at him for a long time. A very soft breeze had picked up. It lifted a few strands of her hair and made them dance around her face.

"You've done this before." His voice was offhand. _Too_ relaxed. He didn't usually talk to anyone on his team like that. Like they didn't matter.

"What?"

"Deciding you don't want to feel one thing, so you feel something else."

Gibbs was silent, looking at Ziva expectantly, but she could only stare back at him.

"Gibbs," she said at last, "When I feel an emotion, it is strong. I do not mix-up one feeling for another."

He grinned and almost . . . he looked like he was going to laugh.

She knew him well enough to know he had no real desire to laugh at her. Still it made her angry. He was trying to manipulate her, she knew that. But to what end?

"Oh, I think you do it for the strongest stuff you've ever felt." His voice was quiet, but thoroughly amused.

She shook her head. "I don't –"

"Your sister's death." He said it with a little grin.

Ziva rolled to her feet in one smooth, synchronized move to face him.

And there it was.

Gibbs went on relentlessly.

"You said the feeling that consumed you when your sister died was anger. But you know, I think that's bull."

He waited, rocking in the chair a bit as if he was just hanging out, listening to the crickets sing and enjoying the night.

He was poking a cobra with a stick, and he knew it.

Usually this sort of thing was more fun. But then, he didn't normally care about the mental state of the cobra when the charade was done. His adversaries in the interrogation room generally deserved everything they got.

Throwing dead family in her face . . . At the moment all he felt was a little sick, and a vague hope that this would work.

Gibbs knew a lot of interrogation techniques, but Ziva had experience handling her fair share. Most of them far harsher than he would ever use against her. At some point he was going to run out of tricks.

"You do know that's a lie, right?" He looked at her curiously, teasingly.

Ziva turned away from him. She was seething, too pissed to speak.

"Rivkin's death, too." She jerked as if he'd slapped her in the face. He continued, as if he hadn't noticed. "You got real mad at Dinozzo. Tony may have shot the guy but he wasn't responsible for his death. You do know who was, don't you?"

He stood. Thought he knew what was coming. "You lie a lot," he said casually. "Guess you don't want to face it."

He'd expected her to scream at him a bit first. She didn't. Ziva was absolutely silent, moving in a blur that almost surprised him.

That was fast, he thought. She's been practicing. And she was on him.

He managed to block the flurry of punches to his face and gut. But he wasn't expecting the kick, was too close to deflect it and too penned in by the porch to move cleanly out of the way. She caught him in the bottom of the ribcage and carried through, like she was swinging a bat at a perfect pitch, right up into his lungs.

Through some miracle of determination he didn't go down, but he did stagger and heave. When she drew back her knee to finish him off he just managed to catch her leg and shove her back.

They were still, facing each other. She was breathing hard, staring at him with wide eyes. Probably torn between attacking and running. He held up a hand, whether to stop her from coming at him or running away, he wasn't sure.

"Can't solve it this way, Ziva." His voice was serious, his own again.

She whirled to run. "_Don't_ run from me," he barked. He didn't want to tackle her, but he would.

"You'd rather feel your own guilt than what they did to you. That's understandable. Just like you wanted to feel anger instead of the hurt when people close to you were killed. Understand that too."

He moved toward her cautiously, watching her hands and feet. "But that's not what's really going on."

Her shoulders heaved as if they'd been fighting for hours.

"Can't fix it like that, Ziva. I told you not to bury it."

He tried to keep the _I'm sorry_ out of his voice.

Any hint of pity and she'd go off like a ten ton bomb. But he was sorry. Life would be a hell of a lot easier if kicking people who hurt you solved the real problems. He'd spar with her all night if he thought it'd do any good. But it wouldn't.

They stood there in the quiet for a long time. Finally she turned away and leaned against the far wall of the porch, her profile limned in the glow of light coming through the living room window. For the first time that night he could see her clearly.

When she finally turned to speak to him her eyes landed on his bare feet. She stared at them, thankful she hadn't instinctively stomped on one when attacking him. She could have crippled him for weeks.

"Why are you doing this, Gibbs?" she asked tonelessly. "I've assaulted you. You should be throwing me off your property. Off your team."

Gibbs gave her his _don't change the subject_ glare. But he also relaxed. He really didn't want to go three rounds with Ziva unless there was a team of medical personnel standing by.

He didn't say anything, just turned and set his hands on the thin white railing separating his porch from the world, leaning forward to look into the dark bushes planted just below. He wouldn't bother answering a question they both knew the answer to. He didn't leave his people behind.

"I did not mean to lie." The words were flat, no inflection at all. But he knew these days what his trust meant to her, knew enough to hear what went unsaid. A whispered _please_.

Hadn't they just been here? Gibbs gripped the wall, letting his body lean into it.

Turning in circles, he thought. But he had walked this before, and he knew she wasn't in a circle. Not really. This was a maze, and a terrible one. But taking a wrong turn at least let you know that you had to go another way.

"I know." _Forgiven_, unspoken.


	4. Dawn

**Chapter Four: Dawn**

_**Gibbs:** He raised you to be a ruthless, soulless killer._

_**Ziva:** I did not mean to live through it._

**- From_ NCIS: Good Cop, Bad Cop_**

**x x x x x**

The far ends of Gibbs' porch were blocked in with wide, rough gray stones. Ziva hoisted herself up to sit on them. She tucked herself into the shadowy corner where the stones met the house and let her body lean on the wood siding.

Gibbs let her escape his line of sight, for the moment. He stayed where he was, leaning on the front of the porch, eyes resting on his neighbor's yard. When she'd settled and he glanced her way the house looked to be the only thing holding her up. Ziva's shoulders were curled in. They seemed narrow, thinner than he was used to. Not a posture she normally let anyone see.

He wondered if she had ever revealed frailty like this to her captors. Probably not. He'd seen her through the scope, tied to a chair with Saleem's knife at her throat. Her back had been straight.

There was silence between them for a long time. But Ziva regrouped.

"I once set a bomb that killed two boys."

Gibbs lowered his head and stared hard at the smooth white trim under his hands. It looked blue in the night.

Was she really going to . . . ?

Of course she was. He sighed and braced himself. He should have known they would end up here. Ziva, he smiled grimly, was a fighter. Always.

"The cell we were tracking used young children as couriers. The couriers did not usually enter the building. But that day . . ." she drifted away, and then back again. "Their bodies were blown to pieces. Our technicians managed to retrieve most of them from the debris, to identify them. They were brothers. Five and seven."

Gibbs let the words go, dark into the dark. There was nothing to say to that.

A long time passed before she spoke again. She was just warming up.

"One time we tracked a wanted man and his body guards to an abandoned building. They were hiding on the top floor. And they were good, Gibbs. They spotted our surveillance on the second day. Sixteen men with an arsenal, but we did not hesitate . . . even when they began to move through the lower floors, trying to escape. It was supposed to be abandoned."

He didn't want to picture it. The problem was he'd been in too many situations just like it. His mind thrust the images at him faster than he could push them away.

"The fight lasted," she paused. "Perhaps an hour. When we entered the building we found a little boy on the second floor. He was . . . fine. Hiding in a corner."

She broke off long enough for him to turn his head and look at her. She was staring at him, right into his eyes.

"We told the boy he did not have to hide, that he was safe. He said he was not afraid of us and pointed to the far corner of the room. That is where we found his friend. A girl."

Gibbs pressed his hands down into the the railing. The wood pressed back, warm and steady.

"Her legs were torn away. Below the knee. Our medical examiner said later they were shot off. It must have been slow, to bleed to death like that."

The picture bloomed in his head, red blood on a dirty floor. Gibbs breathed evenly and shoved that away hard.

"Something similar happened on an op I ran in – "

"Ziva." He tried for neutral. His voice carried menace all the same. "You going to tell me the story of every dead little girl you ever found, now?"

She waited for him to go on, as if she expected him to elaborate on that somehow, and then continued as if she hadn't heard him.

"Ballistics," she said flatly. "We catch so many killers that way. I did not just find that little girl."

Gibbs turned his head away from that. He swallowed, working past the images pressing at him. Choking him.

A minute passed before he responded. She couldn't see his face now, but all the menace had gone from his voice, leaving it hollow. "You said yourself. You didn't know she was there."

"Apparently they played there often, in the abandoned rooms on the lower floors. They entered through an adjacent basement, never went to the upper floors. That is how they slipped Mossad's surveillance."

A heavy silence.

"I told myself that I did not know she was there, Gibbs. And do you know what?" It was strange to hear a question in such a lifeless voice. "It worked. I was sad for a time and then I hardly felt a thing. I got over it."

_Is that so?_

"Do you think her parents ever got over it, Gibbs?" she asked lightly. "Tell me."

He closed his eyes.

"There is guilt. Do not tell me I don't have it. I deserve it. That and more."

Gibbs didn't move, but the dam in his mind had broken, finally. Old memories pushed at him, forcing him under. Things he'd put away a long time ago.

An entire family in a building they'd destroyed, grandparents and parents and children, bodies as broken as the walls. A dusty car with targets sitting in the front seats. The children in the back had been too small to see . . . They hadn't known to avoid them.

A little girl survived it though, somehow. Not a scratch on her, but she'd been covered in her sisters' blood. She'd clung to their bodies and screamed like murder when they'd finally pulled her away. Gibbs remembered looking at those bodies. Forcing himself to look at them.

The girl told them her name was Mariam. When he used to dream about that car the faces would change to his own girl's. But that was before Kelly died. He hadn't dreamed about Mariam in a long time.

Ziva was looking at him. Curious.

"Not going to say 'no,' Gibbs? Tell me I am just a victim in all of this?" She smiled gently, to show her teeth.

The memories shoved at him relentlessly, no matter how he pushed back. They were stronger. Smothering.

Finally he let it flood through him, like bourbon in his blood. Just for a moment he was enraged.

Of course he was. Ziva wanted to wallow in guilt. If he wouldn't let her do that then she wanted to fight, apparently with a man who was absolutely off his head. Fighting back with a fury strong enough to beat this back. She'd played him perfectly.

To feel the guilt of it was unbearable, like burning alive in a mental fire. Anger was a relief, however brief. He couldn't imagine wanting to dwell in that guilt, couldn't imagine what she was running from, in her own mind, that retreating into _this_ was better.

But then, Ducky had told him it would be unimaginable, hadn't he? _Things you and I __can't even imagine._

He breathed and gripped the wood in his hands until it felt like it would dent under his fingers. After a bit he smirked, despite the anger still boiling low in his gut. Gibbs pushed off from the railing to lean against it instead, his arms folded across his chest as he turned to face her. Fortunately for both of them he'd been doing this - all of it - a lot longer than Ziva. He wasn't so easily provoked. He knew a better path than anger. And he'd be damned if one of his own agents was going to manipulate him.

Gibbs calmed himself deliberately, occupying his mind for a minute by wondering if Ducky had seen this coming. Had he known Ziva would seek him out? It was Ducky who got Gibbs in the right frame of mind all those weeks ago, when he'd touched on Ziva's past during the Wooten case. Well, at the time Ducky seemed to be talking about the Wooten case. Or was the domestic abuse of Georgia Wooten a convenient pretext to talk about Ziva? Was it both?

Gibbs wouldn't put it past him. People didn't often appreciate how wily Duck was. But the doctor was observant, and he'd been doing this even longer than Gibbs.

"Guess Duck was right."

"What?" Her voice was as sharp as her knives.

He ignored that, went to the source. "Accidents are a part of the job. You've done your best to protect innocent lives. You've saved far more than you've taken. So what exactly are you doing, Ziva? Trying to get me to come at you? Think you'll feel better if I punch you in the face?" He let his anger bleed into the words.

She stiffened at that and leaned forward, eyes glittering.

Gibbs watched her, incredulous. She really would prefer he attack her.

"Maybe I would feel better after –" she snarled, but faltered, her eyes darting away from him.

"After what?"

She didn't seem to hear him. To go by the look on her face she was locked in a fight with some enemy he couldn't see. He waited, letting her mind wander to wherever it was headed so relentlessly. She would come back eventually.

Soon, if the droop of exhaustion pulling at her body had anything to do with it.

"I did not come here to fight, Gibbs," she said at last. "I came for a little peace, actually." She laughed shortly, struggling to keep her despair under control. "I just – I do not know any other way."

"Other way?"

"Any other way to fight." Fatigue laced her words. "Talking will not help with _this_. Don't tell me it will, Gibbs. I will not believe you."

He let his arms drop to his sides and walked closer, slowly, until he was leaning on the far end of the wall she sat on. "No, I don't think it will do anything for your . . . regrets. Only way to fix a mistake is to do better next time."

"Ah," she laughed again, the slight noise coming out like a cough. "I forgot. You do not think guilt is the problem."

"Nope." And in his voice . . . his own regret.

She glanced up at that. "Am I a mistake you are fixing, Gibbs?"

"You're not the first person I've met with PTSD, Ziva."

She felt like she should be annoyed at that. Such easy categorization. On some shelf in Gibbs' mind she had been neatly labeled and placed, she supposed, along with all the other fuck-ups he'd had under his command. But she couldn't bring herself to argue with that. It seemed she didn't care anymore what he thought of her. She just wanted to accept his greater experience. Just trust him. She was tired of fighting, of crashing into the same wall over and over again. Exhausted as she had never really been before.

Perhaps that was why she came here in the first place, all those months ago. It seemed some part of her mind had known before the rest of her that she wouldn't be able to do this on her own.

"Gibbs," she was so tired. Ziva stared at the floor, wondering where her energy had gone. In the face of this fatigue nothing in the world seemed to matter anymore. "I would do anything you told me to do, if I thought it would help. I _have_ done anything. Even – there, in Somalia. After you found me . . . you said to let them help me. And I _did_."

He nodded sharply. She'd trusted him with the physical stuff right away.

But that was the easy part. To think of it like that made his stomach burn, but it was no less true. The harder part was _this_. She'd only tonight . . .

"You told me to call you and now I have. You said that talking is the way to fight it. But I do not have anything to say."

"You're saying it now, Ziva."

She shook her head. "No. You were right. I do not think about it. I will think about anything else, if I must. _Do_ anything else."

She looked at him bleakly. "I am sorry, Gibbs."

He raised an eyebrow. An apology wasn't weakness if it was between friends. Or family. But she'd about reached her quota of 'sorry's for years in the past hour.

Ziva nodded. She was so tired.

"I do not . . . feel it. Not usually. I supposed that is strange."

It sounded like a question, but he made no move to answer her. She looked away from him. "I would rather eat glass than drag words to match that time up my throat, do you understand that?"

Yeah. Gibbs did.

"When I remember –" He studied her, trying to read her, but she was totally motionless and gave nothing away. "I know what the words are supposed to be. But why bother, Gibbs? Words are meaningless. When I think about it there are no words. There is only pain."

There was nothing to say to that, either. He tipped his head back to rest against the pillar at his back, staring at the shadowy ceiling of the porch.

The silence went on and on. She knew how it was supposed to go, but . . .

"I'm sorry, Gibbs." She laughed shakily, nervously.

He'd never heard that laugh before. And two _sorrys_ in the space of a minute. Seemed she was going for the record.

"I want to – do what you said. If you think it will help, with . . . this, then I believe you. But I do not know what to say."

There it was.

An invitation, if he'd ever heard one.

Gibbs took a deep breath and looked her over carefully. As an agent he'd interviewed many women who'd been attacked, to get the facts. This wasn't quite the same.

"What happened to your neck, Ziva?"

"What?"

There hadn't been anything wrong with her neck when they took her out of that camp, at least as far as Gibbs could tell.

After that first night, when he'd found her on his steps, he'd even gone back and looked at the medical report. There'd been some bruising and abrasions, but she'd had those everywhere. There was nothing serious enough on the neck to draw any attention in the doctor's exam. But.

"You keep touching it."

As he watched, Ziva touched it again.

"Oh."

He waited.

"It was worse, when they came from behind," she said simply. And then, "Did you see the feral cats, when you were in Tel Aviv?"

Gibbs frowned. The hell?

"No."

Ziva nodded and paused as a car came down the street, its headlights sliding over the dark gray view and then fading away again, back into the world. She felt like she was in a dream.

"Well, you were not there long. But wild cats are common in the city. There was a pack of them outside my childhood home. My mother loved them – they ate all the rats."

Gibbs watched her pull at the chain of her necklace. "I used to watch them hunt when I was a little girl. Cats stalk first, you know. When they're close to their prey they leap and grab it," her fingers skimmed over her throat. "By the neck."

Ziva's eyes fled from his, but her voice was even. "Sometimes they bite down and kill right away. Sometimes they release, so that the prey will run, and then they grab it again. I tried to get them to kill me."

She looked at him, as if gauging his reaction.

She couldn't possibly think he'd judge her for that? He kept his eyes on her. Kept himself steady. "Tried that myself with Paloma Reynosa. Didn't work."

Her mouth dropped open. Apparently that came as a surprise.

"I provoked Paloma the same way I provoked you." He rubbed his ribs with a faint grin. "_She_ gave me candy."

_And Mike Franks' finger_, better left unsaid.

"I am glad," Ziva managed.

His eyes bore into hers. "Me too."

They held each other's gaze for a long time. Finally she turned so that she was facing the street, and him as well. Ziva drew her knees up onto the stones and clasped her hands over them, her back resting against his house. When she looked beyond him the night had passed away. It was already dawn. Just past Gibbs' shoulder a pink ray of sun was spreading across green, green grass. She kept her eyes on that.

"I felt like a child in a board game. You know, one with extra lives. I did not die." She sounded puzzled. "They kept grabbing me, and I would try to run, but . . . and then I would fight. I lost, of course." She swallowed. Lifted a hand to her neck and only realized what she was doing when cold fingers touched her skin. She needed to just say it.

He could see her tense. Gibbs watched her calmly.

"When they . . ."

There was utter silence. Where were the birds, she thought absently. What had she been saying?

Ziva took a shaky breath. "I fought. Some would hold my arms. Legs. But that does not bother me so much," she squinted into the watery sunlight. Another breath. "The one who held my neck, my head . . ."

She wasn't breathing right. Her thoughts were strange, disjointed. How could she be out of breath when she was sitting in one place? She was lightheaded now.

Was she going to faint?

Ziva would never forgive herself if she passed out like a corsetted woman in an old-fashioned novel. Though Gibbs was well cast to play the gentleman who was always on hand to catch the swooning lady.

An hysterical giggle tried to break through her throat.

If she laughed now Gibbs would think she was insane. He was holding himself absolutely still, but it was an effort, she could tell. How he must loathe this.

Laughing would be better than fainting . . . Ziva breathed deeply, slowly. Getting it out without fainting or laughing was the goal she would shoot for. Best to hurry.

"The - " she gagged on calling it a person, or a man. So much bigger than one man could possibly be, in her mind . . . She was seeing spots. Ziva decided hastily to skip it. "Holding my neck was . . . always the one who -" She closed her eyes._ Harah Ziva just end it_, " - hurt the most."

There. Not very eloquent. Still, she'd said it. Ziva actually sighed in relief. The silence went on and on again, and he wasn't any different from before, but for some reason it felt better now.

She'd smoothed down her hair as she spoke. Gibbs tracked the motion with his eyes, sure she wasn't aware she was doing it.

Ziva recovered her equilibrium as mysteriously as she'd lost it just a moment ago. "They took turns. I always passed out before they finished," she said casually. She was insanely grateful that her breathing, at least, had come back under her control. "Every time I blacked out I thought it was the end. That I would finally die. But I never did."

He looked at her steadily, his clear eyes never wavering.

"I think they liked it, when I fought them. Eventually I tried to . . . not to run. But I could not stop."

She drifted away, right in front of his eyes.

"You were protecting yourself." Gibbs' voice was perfectly calm. Scraped clean of the churning in his gut. And of the dead feeling like a pressure in his chest. He could only hear her if he was calm.

Ziva shook her head. He didn't understand this. "No, I was not. I wanted to let it come to me. If I stopped fighting . . . But I was mindless. Like an animal. Struggling made it worse." She cleared her throat. Her voice was hoarse.

He knew he should simply let her talk, now that she finally was, but that idea. Not fighting . . . he didn't like it.

He could banish the images from his mind as quickly as they came, but he couldn't stop the icy feeling that was spreading through him now. Gibbs jammed his hands in his pockets to keep them still.

He wasn't a goddamn professional and she wasn't just an agent and he couldn't let that go.

"Fighting wasn't mindless, Ziva. It was instinct. It was right." He said it slowly. He wanted the words to sink into her bones.

"What is the difference? It was just another thing out of my control that should not be. Another thing I can not stop. It was harder than anything else because it was _me _that I fought. And I always lose."

She'd slipped into the present tense without seeming to notice. Gibbs finally let himself look away.

He'd had trouble watching Laura Osgood in distress, for god's sake, and that woman sold her soul.

Ziva . . . _she's one of us._ Gibbs said that to her father the first time he'd met him. _One of mine_, he'd meant. He had known Ziva would come back to NCIS, even when he left her in Israel. Known that she would always be one of his to protect, as best he could.

"Your instincts helped you survive. You're alive. They're dead. Some would call that a win." He said it softly. It was hard to call this a win.

Ziva ignored that. She might have lived, but she hadn't exactly _survived_. Just like Gibbs said, so long ago now, a part of her died out there. Now she fought and fought, and stayed stuck, and only became more and more tired. She broke.

"I just want to be who I was before. I could handle anything, Gibbs. Now . . . I do not know who I am now. This is not me."

She was backing away from it again. From Somalia.

He let his eyes run over her. She was beyond tired. He wasn't too sharp himself, though what she'd said about her time in that camp left him restless, not tired. Gibbs forced himself to relax against the pillar at his back.

"What isn't you? Someone who needs help?"

"Accepting help is not the issue. I do that every day."

"In the field, yeah," he agreed. "This is a different kind of fight. Different kind of help." He rolled his head to look at her. "And I for one am glad you're not the same person you were."

"What, a ruthless, soulless killer?" She reminded him of his words of more than a year ago.

He didn't respond.

"Do you think that who we are is something we can really change, Gibbs? I am not sure it is possible." Ziva ran a hand over the rough stone she was sitting on. "Malachi said that we are like snakes. Try to shed the old skin and it only grows back."

Gibbs rolled his shoulders and turned to look out at the street again, focusing on _not_ saying something unforgivably stupid. But he really had developed an amazing dislike for everything Mossad. Usually he could kill or imprison anyone who came after one of his people. Neither of those options had been practical in the case of Eli David, unfortunately, and it was damn irritating.

He put some effort into keeping his voice mild. "Yeah, well, maybe you started out with a soul, and a conscience, but shed them to be what your father wanted you to be. Maybe they've grown back."

She turned that over in her mind. Said absently, "I did not realize they would be this much trouble."

He laughed a little bitterly then – and winced. His ribs hurt.

"Yeah." His voice tipped from regret into sadness.

She studied his profile. He'd turned to place his hands on the wall, looking down at them in that distracted manner that meant he was disturbed. She wondered what his conscience bothered him about.

Gibbs had reminded her earlier that she hadn't committed any crimes, not technically, anyway, as if that would comfort her. She knew he could not say the same about himself.

She'd said she did not care about the technicality of breaking the law. Ziva wondered now if that was really true. She'd never thought about what it would be like to know she had committed a serious crime. An intentional murder.

It may not be an easy thing to live with. But he shouldn't feel guilt for what he had done. It was justified, crime or not . . .

Ziva leaned toward him and reached a hand out. Slowly, tentatively, she placed it on his shoulder. She was surprised when he didn't move. Gibbs stood there quietly and submitted to it, the old t-shirt under her fingers soft and very warm.

"I made sure they all died, Gibbs," she said. "Everyone in the cell that planted the bomb. That killed Tali. I hunted them all. And then I hunted their friends. I would do it again."

Gibbs nodded. It was good that she was reaching out on a night like this. He didn't look up at her though, didn't really bother following what she was trying to say.

Ziva couldn't have known how far off the mark she was.

Gibbs wasn't thinking about his family. He was thinking about Jenny. He'd met her only a few years after Shannon and Kelly died. Not long after he'd lost himself.

After Jen's death Mike Franks asked Gibbs what had happened to her and Gibbs had answered honestly. "Me." _He_ had happened to her.

Ari said once that Gibbs reminded him of his father. Gibbs didn't think he was like Eli David, not anymore at least. But there had been a time . . . _He raised you to be ruthless, soulless . . . _Jenny hadn't been ruthless when Gibbs met her. She certainly hadn't been a killer. It was Gibbs who taught her how to be those things.

He'd thought he was protecting her, teaching her how to survive.

Gibbs was willing to bet that Eli had been thinking the same thing when he raised Ziva to follow in his footsteps. If anyone had shown Jenny how to shed the best of herself like a snake shed its skin, it was Gibbs. After they drifted apart he had slowly come back to himself, but Jenny . . . Jenny never had. In her, he knew, he had raised a flower of fire. Just as Eli David hammered Ziva into a spear.

Gibbs accepted his own crimes, would never feel real guilt for them. But he did feel it for Jenny's.

She pulled her hand away.

He was uncomfortable, she could feel it radiating off him. Ziva firmly turned her mind to other things, trying to give him the privacy he clearly wanted, even in her own head. She wasn't quite sure what he was thinking about, but she did not want her curiosity to intrude on anything he wished to hold to himself.

She looked for something strong and . . . redeeming to say.

"The anger after Tali's death was useful, at least. It was how I learned much of what I know about intelligence work," she offered eventually. Ziva smiled a little. After all, there were good memories, too. "You know, I do not think my father has ever been more proud of me."

The tendons in Gibbs' arms jerked tight, turning to wire under the skin. Ziva winced. That hadn't been the right thing to say.

A minute passed in tense silence. Finally Gibbs straightened without looking at her.

"Be back in a second." He disappeared into the house.

Ziva watched him go and turned back to the street, somehow feeling both numb and miserable at the same time. She hadn't wanted him here when she first called. Now she wished she had not chased him away.

But Gibbs returned quickly. He stood before her and abruptly held out his hand. "I want you to have this."

Ziva looked into his outstretched hand and jerked back. Shocked.

"No," he studied her face and grinned. "It's not what you think. This was my mother's."

His usual confidence had returned full force. "She had a peaceful life. I want you to have it," he said again. _I want you to have the same._

"C'mere." He reached out with his other hand, then, his eyes on hers as he gently grasped her wrist and brought it toward him. He placed the smooth silver ring into her hand and closed her fingers over it.

Her hand tightened around the metal, solid and warm in her palm.

"You're more than your father's daughter, Ziva."

She didn't say anything. Just looked down at their hands.

Gibbs considered the top of her head a little ruefully. He didn't usually give his people stuff, and something so personal - hell, it crossed a lot of lines that Gibbs never crossed.

But this seemed right . . . well, hopefully she would hear him.

He leaned in, slowly, and spoke low, into her ear.

"Listen to me, Ziva. You can't go back to being the person you were. What happened – it changed you. You think it's made you weaker. Because it's hard, now. I know it's hard." He smiled grimly into her hair, tightened his grip on her hand. "But you're wrong, Ziva. You don't see it now, but you're stronger than you were. I promise you that."

She stared at her hand, small in his own.

And finally got it together enough to whisper a response. A thank you.

He released her hand and pulled back out of her space to settle on the stone ledge, leaving a few feet between them. They sat together for awhile, sharing the quiet that came before the day began. Mornings in a family neighborhood started a little later in summer.

It was Gibbs who eventually spoke

"You talk to Eli since he was here?"

"No." She was distracted, still staring at her hand. Processing what he'd said. "But that is not unusual. Even before we were rarely in contact, unless I was based at Mossad's headquarters. My father is dedicated to his work," she said absently.

She happened to glance up at him as she trailed off. He threw her a look that was pure Gibbs. Furrowed, grumpy brow. Incredulous eyes. Sleep-mussed hair sticking up like a . . . porcupine.

Ziva locked onto his gaze for just a moment, before a shout of laughter erupted from her chest. Gales of it followed, echoing out into the neighborhood.

Finally she calmed, her lungs aching, stomach muscles sore, and looked at him through the water in her eyes. He was grinning at her like a boy. She brushed away the tears of mirth from her cheeks.

"I suppose you knew that."

"Knew the Director of Mossad is dedicated? To his job? Yeah," he said, somehow perfectly dry despite the grin. "Think I picked up on that."

They were quiet again and . . . it was easy, and ordinary. Real. What she had wanted from a family, she supposed, but hadn't expected to find here, and never on a night like the one she'd just come through. Ziva considered the man sitting in front of her and gave him a different kind of smile then, an assessing little quirk of the lips that he didn't quite understand.

She was thinking about something Abby said once._ The man is magic_.

Ziva wondered how he got so very good at caring for people. Wondered if it was something he was always good at, or if it was the sort of thing you could learn. She looked down at the ring still pressed into her hand.

"I was more like my father then," she mused. "When I was hunting them. I did not care about anything else. Eli encouraged me, but it was something I was happy to be anyway, at the time." She glanced at Gibbs. Ziva wouldn't normally ask him, but then, she wouldn't normally be on his porch at this hour, either. She was too tired to care much anymore about annoying Gibbs.

Besides, she'd already kicked him and then deliberately provoked him. In response he'd given her a gift she would cherish forever and made her laugh. He seemed to be immune to her attacks.

"Do you think that is what makes him what he is? Desire for revenge? I do not know much about his life before he married my mother."

It was in her voice, plain as day. _Why didn't he come for me?_

Gibbs shook his head, flashing back to Eli. _Loyalty . . . I did not come here for her . . . You have a way of making my family disappear. _

How could he be the one making them disappear? As far as Gibbs could tell Eli David didn't exactly hold them close to begin with.

The man had lost two children already. He'd once had the power to keep Ziva close to him, but he gave that away. "I don't understand him, Ziva." Gibbs rubbed a forefinger down a seam in the stones. _I did not come here for her._

He would never understand a man like that. "He should've come for you. In Somalia. In DC. He should come for you now." You should be having this conversation with your father, he didn't say. And my daughter should be wearing that ring.

Things didn't always turn out like they should.

She turned the ring in her hand, examined it in the growing light. There was a celtic design etched delicately into the band. Ziva slipped it onto a finger and curled the hand into a fist. She had thanked him for leaving her in Israel, but . . .

"I never said thank you for rescuing me, Gibbs. For coming for me. Thank you."

Gibbs looked away from her, turning his head to watch the soft pink light fade to yellow as it spread across his lawn. It was going to be a beautiful day.

"What do you say you come over and make me dinner?"

Ziva actually blinked at him. "What?"

"As a token of your appreciation. I'd want to eat a little earlier than your usual visiting hours, though." He tapped his nonexistent watch again.

She smiled, bemused and tired but pretty content to roll with whatever Gibbs said. "I would love to, Gibbs. Here? Or at my apartment?"

"Here. If that's alright."

Ziva frowned. Gibbs was inviting her over for dinner? That was . . . beyond strange.

"Of course. I'm not usually . . ." she waved a hand at his house, and he nodded. She was comfortable in his home, most of the time. If she wasn't when she came they would just sit on the porch again.

"When would be a good night for you?"

"I'll leave that up to you," he said. "Just call. Not sure one dinner's gonna do it, though."

_Oh. _

She nodded and looked down at the ring, twisting it on her finger. "I understand."

"Good."

He was watching her. She looked up and watched him back.

"So I talked, Gibbs. When do you expect I will be cured?"

He cocked his head. "I look like a doctor to you?"

"Well . . ."

"You telling me you don't feel better?"

She stared at him.

He smiled. "Good."

"You said it would not work quickly!" she laughed, a little disbelieving and a little . . . just feeling good.

He rolled his eyes. She was teasing him, of all things. "You've been carrying this stuff around for a long time, Ziva. You're relieved. I don't think it's exactly 'worked' yet."

She grinned at him. "I still owe you dinner."

"Damn straight."

He glanced back at the sun and slid to his feet with the faintest of groans. "I'm going into the office. You're gonna take a nap. I'll expect to see you at noon." He looked her over. "Make that 1300."

He let his voice go quiet. "And Ziva. Don't let it go so long next time. You come to me."

Ziva gaped at him. "Gibbs, I –"

"Don't argue with me, David. Take a nap. You look like crap."

And Ducky didn't like it when Gibbs pushed the ducklings too hard.

He gave an abortive stretch, grunting and lowering his arms before he got halfway. His ribs hurt like _hell_. "And I really don't need Ducky on my case today," he muttered. Was she wearing steel-toed boots?

"Um," she said. "Would you like me to – "

The Talk was definitely over. He was giving her a _spit it out_ glare.

" – tape your ribs?"

The glare turned into - nothing she would repeat.

"Or not! I will just go home to . . . take a nap." She spoke the last bit slowly and cast him a confused look, as if she was somehow unclear on the instructions.

He bent over to pick up his mug and gestured inside the house. "You can use my couch if you want. Save you the trip home."

This was a very weird vibe. Nice Gibbs and Regular Gibbs were all mixed-up. Ziva stood and picked up her own mug. "Um. Thank you for the tea, Gibbs."

"You're welcome," he assured her as he turned toward the door. "Really. Stuff tastes like grass."

He set his mug on the kitchen table and headed up the stairs, not looking back to see if she'd followed him in.

Twenty minutes later he came back down, moving quietly, and smiled. Nice Gibbs was on full display, though there was no one there to appreciate it. Ziva was sprawled out on his couch, hands tucked under her head. Snoring.


	5. Autopsy

_**a/n**: Thank you for the reviews and feedbacks! Here, an interlude for Gibbs . . .  
><em>

**Chapter 5: Autopsy  
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_**Dinozzo**: I broke rule number ten. Again. Never get personally involved in a case._

_**Gibbs**: Yeah . . . That's the rule I've always had the most trouble with._

**From_ NCIS: Obsession_**

**x x x x x x  
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Ducky saw it, of course, the minute Gibbs walked into autopsy.

And Gibbs saw him seeing it, right away. Some injuries are easy to hide, but Gibbs had never found direct blows to his body's core to be among them. He was at least moving smoothly enough that no one else on the team had noticed.

He listened to the first half of the autopsy results and waited for it. Ducky always launched into personal stuff in the middle of a report. He'd try to pass it off as lack of focus, but Gibbs didn't fall for that. Not anymore at any rate. It was strategy.

He'd snare Gibbs first, with the promise of a clue. Then Ducky would demand answers, and cough up the rest of the autopsy information only when Gibbs gave him, well . . . the Gibbs information.

" . . . and as you can see, there is some slight jaundice in the eyes. Jethro," Ducky's voice was all of a sudden surprised. Gibbs would've snorted if he hadn't known how much it would hurt. "You look a bit stiff."

"It's nothing, Duck. You were saying? About the liver?"

"Hm." Ducky poked him in the ribs.

"OW!"

"What's happened to your abdomen, Jethro?"

Gibbs glared. And sighed. There were times you could put Ducky off and then there were times when Ducky was actually being a doctor. He could try to run, but the clue bait tactic had worked. Gibbs wanted the rest of the autopsy report.

Not to mention Ducky could probably chase him down in his current state. Which the doctor almost certainly realized, since he wasn't bothering to cover the exit.

"Fell on a boot."

Ducky raised an eyebrow. "I wasn't aware you had been in the field this week. Troublesome suspect?"

Duck knew damn well they hadn't been in the field. "Not exactly."

The NCIS ME never glared at anyone. He didn't need to. He just _looked_ at you. Gibbs would think they taught that as part of the psych degree, except he knew for a fact the doctor had been able to do this before.

Gibbs rolled his eyes. Fine. "It was Ziva's boot."

Duck's other eyebrow went up. That's when Gibbs saw it, and knew for sure.

That wily glint. Ducky wasn't surprised in the least.

Gibbs huffed as much as his ribs would allow. _Herbal tea_, for god's sake. How long had his ME been leaving him breadcrumbs?

"Oh my. Better have a look then." The doctor twirled his fingers in a take-off-your-clothes kind of way.

"Duck it's really – "

"Come along, Jethro. Up on the table. It won't take a moment and then I'll tell you all about Captain Feinstein's liver, hm?" Ducky was already scrubbing his hands.

Autopsy blackmail. In lieu of storming out Gibbs rolled his eyes, again. More violently this time.

The thing was, Gibbs wasn't entirely opposed to having a conversation with Ducky about . . . things. A _brief_ conversation. He followed the doctor back toward his desk and hoisted himself - oh so gently - onto the nearest stainless steel table. Gibbs slipped his jacket off his shoulders wordlessly and yanked up his polo and t-shirt.

Ducky sucked in a breath. "Well. You _fell_ rather hard, Jethro."

The doctor pressed gently against his ribs, working from the top down on his left side. Gibbs held his breath and concentrated on not making any unseemly noises.

"This is the result of one blow?"

Gibbs nodded.

Ducky placed the flat of his hand against the bottom of the ribcage. "Breathe in." Gibbs did. "Exhale."

"And how is Ziva faring? Will she be needing my services?" Ducky's hand slid up higher. "Breathe in."

"She's fine," Gibbs grunted, and breathed out. If he'd been _attacking _her he wouldn't have been kicked in the gut in the first place. Probably.

Gibbs grumpily mused that it was a lot harder to just defend.

Ducky felt along the top of his ribs carefully, the pressure increasing slightly, which did not at all feel good.

The doctor looked at him suspiciously. "I understand she was not here this morning." He reached for his stethoscope and pressed the cold metal disc against the center of Gibbs' chest.

Being well informed was, of course, one of the preconditions of being wily.

"She was . . . tired."

"Ah," Ducky said, as if that explained everything. Who knows, maybe it did.

After a minute the doc put his stethoscope away. "I believe you are going to live, Jethro."

"Really? Thanks, Duck, for clearing that up." He leaned to the side a little, tucking his shirt back in as the doctor admonished him not to fall on anymore boots in the near future.

When they were both done Ducky leaned back in his wheely desk chair and considered him.

Gibbs sat there on the steel table and considered back.

"Jethro," Ducky said finally. "You're contemplative. Which I don't mind saying, is – " Ducky skipped quicky over _worrying_ and _alarming_ to settle on "– unusual. Also, you let me examine you despite the fact that you haven't been shot. Is everything all right?"

Gibbs scratched his head. His mind skittered back over last night. The last few weeks. "Not sure."

Ducky looked at him and waited.

He glared at the doctor for a moment, knowing Duck would understand he wasn't really angry. Gibbs was . . . uneasy. And trying to figure out what to say. Glaring helped that along.

Of course Ducky just looked back at him patiently. Gibbs knew for a fact that Duck could watch grass grow and enjoy it. Right now he was looking at Gibbs like he was some sort of gorgeous heritage seed, growing away on a prize Scottish golf green, the sort of grass people go on vacation to see. People, obviously, who weren't like Gibbs.

Ducky was immune to the glares, always had been. Gibbs gave up after a good five seconds and let his eyes roam over the autopsy room's walls.

The thing was, Gibbs did not consider himself to be an asshole. Or an idiot. His agents may hero worship him but he knew he'd made mistakes. Worse, he hadn't always learned from them. He was determined to change that.

When the stakes were high the learning curve needed to be even higher. And now, with Ziva, the stakes were as high as they got. But for the life of him he couldn't figure out what sorts of lessons he could draw from the relevant past. He flashed back to Ziva sleeping on his couch. Unguarded.

All those mistakes felt tangled up. He wasn't even sure if the past _was_ relevant . . .

He needed to talk it over, and Ducky was the best candidate.

Gibbs eyed the doctor again.

"Ziva and I have been talking. About -" _Damn. _What could he say? " - things. It's brought up some stuff."

Ducky nodded and waited. The bastard. Of course he'd go quiet _now_. Gibbs cracked his neck. Sure, he could admit to himself that he'd made mistakes. That didn't mean he liked to talk about them.

"Before, this kind of situation . . . it's led to dangerous - to people dying, Duck. Or damn close. Good people," he clarified.

An eyebrow crept ever so slowly up Ducky's forehead. "You believe people have died from . . . talking to you."

Gibbs wiped his hands on his pants and rolled his eyes. Yet again. He heard his mother, telling him they'd get stuck up there.

"The talking part isn't the problem." Both Ducky's eyebrows went up at that. "It's the memories."

"Ah . . . Anything specific, Jethro?"

Gibbs took a breath and let it out and wished like hell he was off somewhere getting shot at. "I had a -"

He wasn't going to say flashback. It'd been so mild, anyway. Gibbs waved a tired hand - the one farthest from the side of his ribcage that was purpling. "Some things from around when Kelly died."

He forced himself not to look away from Ducky's kind eyes.

"Other times that's happened - " And what could he say about _that_? After a moment Gibbs straightened his shoulders. He could take responsibility, as he should. "My judgement hasn't been the best."

As Ducky well knew. He'd recognized what was happening and scolded Gibbs going in, pretty much every time.

Going "Lone Ranger" as Dinozzo put it had been perfect for killing Hernandez. Or so Gibbs had thought for a lot of years. But by the time Lara Macy was killed, simply because she knew that he'd murdered a murderer . . . Gibbs had already understood, by then, that revenge killing and vigilante justice were illegal for good reasons.

When the memories came at him though, if people he cared about were in danger, he hadn't been able to control it. Not once. He'd go off grid, chucking his own rules out the window, even though the rules were rules for some damn good reasons too.

_Never get personally involved in a case._

When that rule went, others followed. And someone else would get hurt for his mistakes. Paloma Reynosa took a piece out of Mike and damn near shot his own father. What if Mike's family hadn't made it off the beach in time? Or Christ, if Maddie had died in that car. Drowning would have been too good for him. And Jenny, Jenny had pulled a Gibbs when she went off to die in that diner with guns blazing, right down to dragging Mike Franks along with her. That was what he had taught her.

He was a better teacher now though, and he wasn't going to make those mistakes again.

Gibbs gripped the table he was sitting on and held on tight.

"I need to be sure that isn't happening now. With Ziva. This is -" Gibbs scrubbed a hand through his hair. "It's not my usual ball game."

Half a grin tugged at his face. _The crying, and the women_, as Ziva would put it.

Ducky frowned, trying to puzzle that out. His gaze drifted to Gibbs' abdomen and then back up. "You fear she might be a danger?" _To herself? _If Gibbs thought she was a danger to others Ducky knew she would no longer be on the team.

Was she? Gibbs wasn't sure. He was better at recognizing threats that were more concrete.

"She's . . . pushing it, Duck. She's hurting."

"Yes she is. But she's come to you for help, at long last." _And she's not even old and gray yet_. Ducky had begun to entertain doubts. She really was remarkably stubborn. "That's a very good thing, Jethro."

Gibbs shook his head, gesturing toward the bruising now hidden under his shirt. Feeling frustrated. "I don't know what I'm doing, Duck." But that didn't concern him as much as . . . Gibbs shifted on the table. "I don't have good perspective. It's too close to home."

Ducky considered his friend. "Would you prefer she talk to someone else?"

Gibbs shook his head firmly.

Ducky had thought not.

But then what was the point of this? He sat back in his chair. Had Jethro come here to vent? That was too incredible to believe. He'd said memories . . .

"Have you had experience talking to sufferers of PTSD before?"

Gibbs' eyes darted away and he took a long moment to reply. When he did speak it was with extreme reluctance, as if the words were fighting him. "Rate of suicide in my company ended up being the same as average, for the Corps."

_Oh dear_. "I'll take that as a yes."

Gibbs' eyes continued to wander, then came back. And just looked at him. Whatever these conversations with Ziva were, Ducky thought wryly, they must be short.

Well, subtlety wasn't really Ducky's style anyway. Years of working with Gibbs had beaten it out of him.

"And I shall assume that it did not go entirely well, if you found occasion to compare such statistics in your unit to the average."

Gibbs wiped a hand down his face. "A few of the men," he shrugged. "One after the other. Like it was in the water . . . I was their Gunny, so - " _I was responsible for them. _"They should've come to me."

He could never understand why they didn't come to him.

Gibbs shook his head. "Some of them did, afterwards. After they'd lost a few friends. They were . . ." He wouldn't call them kids. They were Marines, even if they were so . . . "They were young. More homesick than anything else."

He shrugged again. "That was a different situation, anyway."

Ducky sighed. As if Jethro hadn't been homesick. As if losing those boys hadn't stayed with him.

Ducky let him back away from it. He'd have to bolt Jethro to the table if he forced this conversation into yet more uncomfortable territory. "Ziva severed ties with her home rather recently. And NCIS has a very different culture than . . . the one she was used to," Ducky said delicately. "It would not be surprising if she feels somewhat adrift. Or even homesick, as you say."

Gibbs frowned. "She hasn't mentioned it."

Ducky studied his friend, feeling rather adrift himself. Gibbs felt he didn't know what he was doing, but the truth was he knew as much as anyone could. And Ziva had chosen him. It was surprising that he would hesitate like this.

"Are you looking for my blessing, Jethro? You are not a trained psychologist, but I trust you will recognize it if she is really on the edge. As you've just pointed out, you have experience. Your instincts will keep her safe."

The other man lowered his head and tightened his grip on the steel rim of the autopsy table.

Ah. Something there.

Ducky gazed at him shrewdly. Jethro was remarkably skilled at keeping his people safe. But flashbacks to his first family's death, and the lingering memory of whatever had gone on in his unit, would certainly undermine the man's usual confidence in his gut.

"Ziva must look up to you now more than ever, with her father out of her life," Ducky said slowly.

Gibbs cleared his throat. "That's come up."

"She's lucky to have someone she can come to, Jethro. Someone she can rely on."

Gibbs searched his face carefully. "You don't think I should send her to a shrink, Duck? You sure?"

Ducky huffed, recalling the few times he had talked to Ziva about counseling. Or tried to. "Not unless you want to see a relapse. These things can't be forced."

The other man nodded slowly. Not exactly relieved, but . . . "All right."

Ducky frowned. Gibbs was _unsure_.

_It's too close to home . . . _

"Jethro - " Ducky hesitated, then plunged forward. "It is normal, you know, to contemplate death. After loss." He let that hang for a moment. "Or after extreme hardship and change, as Ziva has suffered."

Gibbs winced. Contemplate death? He'd welcomed it, and many times.

He flashed back to the woman responsible for Jen's death, standing with him in Jenny's study. Pain in her eyes after all those years. Grief for the partner Gibbs had killed. He'd looked down the barrel of that gun, and he'd waited for it.

But that wasn't anything he needed Ducky's reassurance on. Gibbs teetered on the edge of revealing a confidence, and finally fell over it.

"She asked me why her father didn't come for her. She thanked _me_ for coming." Gibbs straightened his shoulders. "And I . . . gave her something that I gave to Kelly, before I deployed." Ziva hadn't needed to know it wasn't just his mother's. When he was away from home Kelly had worn that ring around her neck.

Ducky kept his surprise off his face. Perhaps these conversations were a mite longer than one would first suspect.

Ducky looked at him calmly. As if that wasn't enough!

"They're field agents, Duck. I'm not their friend. I'm not their father."

_Never get personally involved._

Well. Ducky nodded. How could he have missed it? This was rather obvious, after all.

"That may be so. Nevertheless they feel close to you, Jethro. You are more than their boss. For Ziva and Tony in particular you are a constant, something neither of them has found elsewhere in their lives."

Jethro shook his head, as if such a thing could be undone by force of will. Well, it probably could, but Ducky certainly wasn't going to encourage it. He sighed. "They recognize you as a protector. Someone they can trust. And rather remarkably, they are both just as stubborn as you are. It doesn't seem to matter how you try to drive them away."

"I don't drive them away," Gibbs muttered.

"Keep them at arms length." Ducky responded instantly.

"That's for the best."

"For who?"

Gibbs glared, and Ducky humored him. "Sometimes, perhaps. Your distance from them does give you the total authority that comes with mystique. And it rather neatly avoids emotional pain when one of your agents is hurt, as they inevitably are in this line of work."

Gibbs looked away at that, and Ducky softly conceded - though not, most likely, in a way Jethro would appreciate. "Well, you put forth a good effort at avoiding such pain, in any case. Jethro, I do understand that it is difficult to set aside your feelings for them, when you must make hard decisions in the field. When you cannot protect them. As you could not protect Ziva."

Jethro sat still. Listening.

"However. She has come to you now, as you have always asked them to do." _And now I know why._ Ducky narrowed his eyes and went in for the kill. "_If_ you can manage it, distance is not what she needs. Not at the moment."

Jethro's head came up at that, meeting Ducky's eyes at last. Then he set his shoulders and slid, rather predictably, off of the autopsy table and onto his feet.

Leroy Jethro Gibbs always rose to a challenge. And really, no matter how uncomfortable he might find it - or how unbelievable that she would rely so entirely on _him_ for _this -_ deep down the man knew what his agents needed. Ziva had chosen well.

Gibbs nodded. "I know." He'd known before. But now the hesitation he had not let Ziva see was gone, and with it that slight, acid tinge of fear.

_Conversation over._

Good. Ducky rose from his chair and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

"Excellent. Although, if you don't mind some advice, you may want to avoid therapeutic sparring with your younger colleagues in the future. Your ribs won't take much more of_ that_."

Ducky's eyes sparkled, clearly finding his latest observation hilarious.

"We weren't sparring. I let her kick me," Gibbs muttered as he pulled on his jacket. "I can take Ziva."

"Hmm. Perhaps your risk for self-harm does bear looking into."

That got the old glare. "You were saying something about a liver, Duck?"

"Ah yes," Ducky smiled brightly. No one could scale Jethro's walls, after all - they must be lowered from the inside. Best leave that to Ziva. "Back to it, shall we?"


	6. Close

**a/n**_: Part one of a missing scene for "Pyramid." Spoilers through the end of Season 8, as well as speculation on the future that surely wanders into the AU. Thanks once again for the reviews and feedback. All comments, corrections, and critiques are very welcome. _

_In fact, helpful clarifying edits come to you in this chapter courtesy of AnotherStupidNickname, whose review helped me make some edits. Thanks ASN! In fact, thanks for all reviewers, this story or any others - all a ya's bring the awesome!  
><em>

**Chapter Six: Close**

_**Gibbs: **You know how I feel about apologies, right?_

_**Ducky: **They're a sign of weakness._

_**Gibbs: **Not between friends. I am sorry, Ducky._

** - From _NCIS:_ _Smoked_**

**x x x x x x**

The cut was deep, still trickling blood. Ziva swayed on her feet, face too pale even in the golden light of the barn.

Gibbs squeezed her arm and forced himself to turn away. The job didn't wait.

"McGee, take her to Bethesda. Call Ducky and have him meet you there. You two, with me." He ran to the Charger and tore back to the Navy Yard, dragging Dinozzo and Cruz along with him.

But they were too late. Barrett was already gone and Cobb was a step ahead, as usual. Until Gibbs finally killed him.

The next time he saw her night had fallen and Cobb's body was in autopsy. Gibbs had assumed, stupidly in retrospect, that Ziva went home from the hospital. But he glanced up from his I-shot-someone paperwork and caught sight of her leaving Vance's office. She descended the stairs to the bullpen, back straight and bearing sure, sat down without a word, and began typing. Posture perfect. Eyes . . . elsewhere.

The rest of the team followed her movements closely, but let her be. Everyone watching knew days when work was more a refuge than an obligation. Ziva's hair was loose around her neck and any evidence of the blow she'd received wasn't visible. But he'd checked in with Ducky and knew there were stitches and butterfly tape holding her together under there.

Gibbs kept them at it for another half-hour. When the words began to blur he looked up from his notes and cut them loose. "Get out of here, all of you. Reports can wait till tomorrow."

It was almost 2100 and none of them had eaten yet. Dinozzo and McGee sprang up like jack-in-the-boxes and grabbed their stuff, only to hesitate as they stepped out from behind their desks. Ziva was totally absorbed in her work, riveted to the screen and typing away as if her report was a river and she a dam that had burst, the words pouring out unnaturally fast, even for her.

Gibbs' agents glanced from Ziva to him and then back again. He caught their eyes and tilted his head toward the elevator. _Go_.

They went.

Gibbs shut down his computer, tidied up his notes, and turned out his desk lamp. Next to him Ziva continued to clack away, oblivious or doing a good impression of it, the keys loud in the evening quiet. When he stopped by her desk she began to speak without looking at him. Without even a pause in her fingers' determined movements.

"Gibbs, I do not –"

"Quitting time, Ziva."

"But I will not – "

He was too tired for this. "Ziva."

She stopped her protests, and the typing, when she looked up and saw his face.

He waited for her as she gathered her things. Then he walked with her to the elevator and stood there, waiting with her for it to come.

Gibbs waited as they descended to the lobby, all the way down, until the elevator carriage rocked to a stop.

Finally he reached out and punched the 'doors closed' button, holding it down with his thumb as he turned to look at her. Prepared to wait.

He followed her quizzical gaze from the elevator panel and back up to him. Took the time to study her brushed-out hair and dark, careful eyes.

"Gibbs?"

Maybe she had a reason. "You seeing Cruz tonight?"

She shook her head. "He is debriefing at Langley."

So, no reason.

She cleared her throat, eyeing him as if he was the one behaving oddly here. "Ray and I have plans for tomorrow night."

As if Gibbs had asked because he wanted to know Ray Cruz's social calendar.

He returned her gaze and waited, totally passive. Well. Except for the fact that he'd trapped her in a steel box with him.

He knew enough to know that it needed to come from Ziva, but he wasn't above helping it along a little. Gibbs could be patient when it was really required. He would keep them in there as long as it took, and he made damn sure that sentiment was clear on his face.

Ziva flipped through ways to get out of this – escape routes, essentially – in her mind. She did not need to talk about . . . the things he probably thought she did. She really didn't. But if Gibbs nailed her down in conversation tonight he would almost certainly get other information out of her, information that she . . . well, that she might really want to talk about. But should not.

She began to shift from foot to foot and he smirked, just a bit, on the inside. Trap anyone in a dark box and they'll most likely cave to whatever you want. Sooner or later.

"Gibbs, you have the funeral to – "

"That's all set." He hadn't gotten more than a few hours sleep since Mike died, but he hadn't really wanted to, either. He'd kept busy. And now the funeral was all set.

"Leyla and Amira – "

"Coming in tomorrow afternoon."

Come on, Ziva.

She fidgeted and looked back at the control panel, at the button held hostage by his thumb. "I suppose this is the part where I . . ." One of her hands jerked his way resentfully, " – invite myself into your home . . ."

Good enough.

He let go of the button and checked his watch as he stepped through the doors, cutting her off just as she started, no doubt, to explain why she couldn't make it. "See you in an hour. Dinner's on you."

He went home to change and try to shake off the day – hell, the month – before his empty-eyed agent showed up.

Gibbs heard her car pull up a good ten minutes before the front door opened. He came up from the basement to find her standing in the entryway of his house, a shopping bag in one hand and the other behind her, still gripping the doorknob as if it were a life-preserver.

She released it to gesture at the bag. "I had something prepared, but if you prefer we can order – "

"What've you got?" He came forward to take the bag from her, pulling a bit to coax her farther in.

"It is shepard's pie. The recipe is supposed to be – "

He didn't need information down to recipe-level. She called after him as he walked back toward the kitchen. "It, ah, just needs to be reheated in the oven for half an hour."

She was polite when she was nervous, and playing proper guest. He wondered where she got that from. Not her father, that was for sure.

"Sounds good." Sounded great, actually. He hadn't eaten real food in days.

She followed him toward the kitchen and watched from the doorway as he pulled the heavy ceramic dish out of the bag. He left a clear plastic container of what looked like greenery in there.

"Four hundred degrees. And the dressing for that salad is actually quite good."

He popped the dish in the oven and got out a salad bowl with a long-suffering look. Ziva grinned, a little good-humor restored, and retreated to the couch, the cross-hatch of stitches at the base of her neck just visible as she turned away.

He joined her a few minutes later, a beer in one hand and a tall, pale glass of iced tea in the other.

She looked at the tea placed in front of her as if he'd just presented her with a bomb, or maybe a party hat. He hid a grin. So she wasn't expecting her bastard of a boss to play proper host.

"I suppose Ducky will be glad someone with a concussion – a _mild_ concussion – is finally drinking his tea." Her eyes rested on the drink like she was taking in a Picasso.

Gibbs grunted and pulled a bottle of pills from the pocket of his jeans, setting it on the table next to the tea. "And taking his pain killers, too."

He sank into the armchair next to the couch, feeling the exhaustion flow into his limbs like lead, and watched as she reached for the bottle. Gibbs raised an eyebrow. Way too easy.

"Wait for the food or you'll just puke 'em back up."

She threw him an exasperated glare and he looked back at her – kind of amused, actually.

"They make me sleepy," she tried. "And I am already tired."

"You can stay here. Or I can drive you home."

She fell back into the couch and waved an arm in a careless _you win_. Gibbs relaxed. Earlier she was pale. Now her skin had an odd cast to it, and looked tight, stretched thin. She needed the sleep.

Just as soon as she let go of whatever it was she was holding in.

Her head tilted back, the uninjured side resting on the cushion behind her. She couldn't bring herself to move enough to look at him, so she spoke to the ceiling.

"The Director said that Cobb's gun never went off. That he shoved Barrett out of the line of fire."

Gibbs sipped from his beer and rubbed at the peeling label with his thumb. Nothing about Cobb was adding up, not the way it should at the end of a case. He was a psychopath, sure. Like a lot of psychopaths he wanted to prove to the world that he was superior, in this case that he had humanity where others had none. But even if that were true, and it somehow explained the last actions of his life, Cobb should have killed Kort. And at least tried to take down Vance and SecNav.

It didn't add up.

Ziva gathered her energy and sat forward, looking Gibbs over as she tried to gauge his mood. This wasn't one of his late-night triage talks, when she was on the edge and he was holding her back. Those were dreams, where she was lost, not herself. And her boss was someone else too, tapping into a hidden, infinite store of patience, sharing things freely. Where anything she said seemed acceptable and it was safe to take the wrappings off raw wounds, to open them to the air.

This wasn't the same. It was his living room, dinnertime. Normal life. She didn't want any special Gibbs treatment here. If she got Nice Gibbs now, where would it end?

The weight of Mike Franks' death, of what it meant to her, had flattened her these last few days no matter how she tried to push it away. She supposed Gibbs was picking up on that despite all her efforts to rub the evidence of it out. She wasn't as good at keeping things from him as she used to be, if she'd ever been good at it at all.

But there was something else now, too. Her bizarre afternoon with Cobb had her thinking, and the questions were insistent, picking at her mind like a hundred little needles. She needed Gibbs to answer them. She needed him to . . . cooperate. To talk to her like he had before, in the dark.

She wished, irrationally, that the lights in his living room were a little dimmer.

"He was . . . professional. Careful." she said slowly. "With me. Like he knew."

Gibbs' eyes shifted from his beer to her, and looked at her patiently. It was strange, very strange, to talk of this and see his face so clearly. She ended up looking away, not wanting to read whatever she would find there.

She'd never told anyone what happened in Somalia, except for what Gibbs had wrung out of her, and he swore he wouldn't tell anyone. But there had been that exam.

"Cobb read my file." She wiped a finger through the condensation on the glass in front of her and glanced at him, waiting to see if he confirmed that.

Gibbs nodded. Cobb did his research. He had no doubt the bastard read all of their files.

She watched his thumb worry the bottle of beer in his hands.

"The medical report from Somalia is in my file?"

He waited until she looked up and met his gaze. "Yes."

Ziva hadn't actually been sure about that. She wasn't an NCIS agent at the time, wasn't even an American. She had been . . .

She closed her eyes and steeled herself.

"Does Mossad have it?"

"No."

"You are sure?"

Gibbs rested his elbows on his knees as he thought that over, trying to be transparent for her. To be sure. "I asked Vance to keep it confidential. I specifically included Mossad and your father in that. Vance said he would, and I believe him."

She opened her eyes and glanced at him, assessing. Still she looked uncertain.

He met her eyes and tried to show, to communicate, that he understood. How they loathed pity, as if it were a poison that would spread, and make them weak. Because it was. Hating that others might think they knew them, knew anything at all about them, just because they knew a little piece of their history. As if that knowledge might reveal every weak point, every vulnerability. Because it could. They had triggers, the two of them. Small things that cut deep, tied right into their hearts. Details that could bring them to their knees.

He understood.

"They don't have it, Ziva. I'm sure."

Her gaze wandered the room, processing that, and came back to rest on his knees. It took her a long time to ask the obvious. "Who has had access to it?"

"Team leader," me. "The Director," obviously. And you're not going to like . . . "Ducky."

Her eyes sharpened and lifted to his, her tone shifting to aggressive. "Ducky."

Ducky was a friend. Ducky was close.

Too close for comfort, with something this dark. With wounds so revealing. That's why you never wanted to talk to him. Or to me.

He understood.

Rationally she must have known that Ducky knew. She just didn't want him to _know_. But he did. Gibbs made the decision to tell him immediately, without Ziva of course, because she never would have given consent. He'd done what needed to be done, and would again, but that didn't lessen what it was. A necessary betrayal.

Gibbs rubbed a hand over his mouth, his one uncomfortable tell. "In order to become an agent an applicant's medical records need to be approved by a doctor, Ziva. You know that."

She continued to look at him, hard, as if a good stare would wipe reality right out of the situation. Gibbs flashed back to Abby, standing in his basement and closing her eyes, wishing with all her might that she could turn back time.

In this, at least, Ziva was exactly like every other injured agent he'd ever worked with.

Unfortunately, Gibbs didn't operate in the realm of fantasy. He was the boss. The responsibilities that went along with that were almost depressingly solid, never leaving any room for illusion. "You were also still recovering from injuries sustained in Somalia. You had to be specially cleared for field work. That's another approval that could only come from a doctor."

"You did not let me out into the field for weeks," she accused.

He tilted his head. "I just said you weren't cleared."

Her eyes stayed hard, and his own narrowed in acknowledgement. "Standard procedure for an incoming agent is to hand over all records to Bethesda, have you examined there." He'd jumped through red-tape hoops of fire to get her out of that. "A complete medical work-up, Ziva. That what you would've preferred?"

She couldn't have handled it, not when she'd only just returned, and she knew it. She'd needed the job, but she had also needed time.

Ziva frowned, thinking over what he'd said, testing it. "Ducky did not examine me."

Gibbs sighed. "Yes, he did."

He waited for the shoe to drop, but it didn't look likely to happen anytime soon. Not before retirement anyway. "Invited you down for tea? Asked you how you were?"

_Set me up for this, right here, neat as his Scotch?_

"O - oh."

That rocked her back on her heels, anyway.

"That . . . was . . . thank you." If her voice wasn't so faint the wobble in it would've been hard to hide.

Gibbs gave a half-nod. The reprieve didn't last long.

"Psych Services knew. When I was interviewed for my evaluation."

He sighed and went back to twisting the bottle in his hands. "They got a watered down version, Ziver. They needed to know something or Vance never would've approved it, wouldn't have been able to. The fact that you'd spent time in captivity was too widely known."

Eventually she nodded, shoulders stiff and unhappy but familiar with the logic nonetheless. Ziva was intrinsically private. Yet she wanted to be an agent, and knew what that meant. Gibbs and Ducky together had been able to shield her from the worst of it. But in the end they were government servants, subject to scrutiny, and there was no such thing as privacy in that.

Ziva had been the property, essentially, of one state or another her entire adult life. She knew the drill. She just hadn't thought it through, hadn't wanted to, since Somalia.

Gibbs didn't look at her as she worked to fold the familiar humiliation away, to move forward. He had no doubt that she longed to close her eyes and wish it away completely, to erase it all, from the paper trail right down to the memory, hers and anyone else's. But she must have known, even if she wanted to deny it. What she'd been through couldn't simply evaporate from the record. It was a damn miracle they'd been able to keep it out of Mossad's hands, considering she'd officially been one of their operatives at the time.

When she spoke she'd dealt with it, at least for now. Folding it up, bottling it, sitting on it. Whatever it was she did. Ready to move on.

"So Cobb read the report."

"Probably."

"But he chose not to use it. He did not want to hurt me," she said, her voice clinical. "Why do you think that is?"

Something about the way she asked that was strange. He sat back in his chair and looked her over. Gibbs hadn't thought Cobb would seriously injure or kill Ziva, not purposefully anyway. He clearly wasn't after Gibbs' team. But hurt her?

The blow to the back of her skull left a cut that went down to the bone. He had seen it, glinting white under blood and hair.

She caught his look and shrugged. "Obviously he _did_ hurt me. I just did not sense that he wanted to, for the sake of it." And then quietly, "Apparently that makes a difference."

She reached forward to pick up her glass and sipped from the tea, her eyes widening in surprise. It was sweetened with honey.

Ziva set the glass down carefully on its coaster and looked at Gibbs. He gazed back calmly, as if coddling her like an infant was part of his everyday routine. "I will be fine tonight, Gibbs, with or without the pills."

"Good." Right. He knocked back more of his beer.

Ziva leaned forward and clasped her hands in front of her, frowning at them as if she had expected to read the answers there, only to discover she didn't speak the language.

Maybe Cobb wasn't bothering her, Gibbs didn't know. But something was off.

He propped his head in his hand and waited, stuffing down the impulse to get up and do something. If he moved this downstairs and began working on his latest she would just sit there and watch him until she fell asleep. Given the way the two of them were sleeping lately she might watch him until morning.

In interrogations he leveled suspects with his stare. It was one of the tools he used to get people to talk, squeezing answers out of them like dark wine out of a press, all with the simple weight of his eyes.

But he heard Ducky's voice in his mind like an echo, like a rule. _These things can't be forced_. Gibbs was in complete agreement, at least when it came to Ziva, and to this.

It just went against his nature. It had been easier to give her space outside. Inside it felt . . . confined. More private, and too personal. Close.

He studied the spines of his books, turning Cobb over in his mind, and kept himself still as he waited for her to open up.

It took a moment to drag himself back when she finally did.

"Has the Director spoken to you?" she asked.

"About what?"

Ziva's eyes flicked to his, and she hesitated.

It was instant, right then, when he met her eyes. Every alarm Gibbs had developed in twenty years on the job went off like sirens in stereo. A familiar blend of anticipation and dread crept up his spine.

He leveled her with a stare like a sledgehammer.

"About what, Ziva?" The words were slow and heavy.

She'd already been wavering. "He is sending me on an assignment. Abroad."

Ziva held up a hand as his look shot past fierce and into feral. "Nothing permanent. I will most likely return very soon."

Gibbs sat forward, the dread replaced by steel, running cold and strong right up his spine. "Not Israel."

"No."

He digested that. And paused, hoping that she would tell him where she _was_ going. She didn't.

"When?"

"I leave the day after tomorrow." She picked up the tea and rotated the glass, letting its coolness soothe her hands. "I will miss Mike's funeral." She lowered her head a bit to take a breath and dragged her eyes back up to his, as if feeling and fighting the weight of his . . . concern. "I am sorry for that."

Gibbs stared at her, torn between the personal and the job. For just a moment he was lost.

He'd given Ziva permission to do it after she came back from Somalia. To say 'I'm sorry.' To claim that little bit of friendship, back when it seemed like another barrier between them, and she was already far too alone. But he wanted to tell her now, suddenly and fiercely, that she apologized to him more than anyone else he had ever known. And that it would hurt, if he let it.

He'd felt like this with Jenny, sometimes. Too much feeling for comfort, when he should be focusing on the job. It set off a never ending tug-of-war war inside. He _cared_ too much, and the dangers of whatever Vance had her doing lurked around the edges of his mind.

He took a second to stuff the feeling down. "You going to have any back up?"

"No."

Well, it wasn't lurking around the edges anymore. His unease flared. No back up.

"How bad is this assignment likely to get?"

"It is impossible to say," her voice was just as smooth as his. Refuge in the job. "It may be pure reconnaissance."

_May be_.

"I'll talk to Vance."

"No." She was firm again, and he felt her pulling away, dancing in and out of his authority just as she had when she was new to the team. "I should go, Gibbs. I am well qualified for . . . this and . . . it is more than my turn to contribute. It is something I want to do."

Something she _wanted_ to do? Something she wanted!

Gibbs wanted to remind her that she had a concussion.

He wanted to get up, right now, and find Vance. Probably not a good idea, since he wouldn't be real helpful to the situation if he was in prison.

His gut wanted to point out that Ziva put the mission first, always. Far before her own life. Far beyond what he or the team allowed, when they were around to have her back. Which of course they wouldn't be if she went off like she wanted, on assignment, on her own.

He wanted to say no, and he knew he could use what she'd told him. Just those two nights, the little she revealed in confidence and vulnerability, was plenty. He could use it, could go over her head, and he would get his way. He could stop it, just as he wanted to.

Of course it would destroy them if he did. _You won't want to work with me_, she'd insisted on that when she'd said she couldn't talk to him. And this is what she meant.

Gibbs didn't really care if it destroyed them. If it was the right thing to do he'd do it anyway.

But he couldn't lie to himself, even on those occasions when he really wished he could. And he knew it wouldn't be right. The truth was that Ziva hadn't compromised the job, not once. He didn't honestly think she would now, either. She'd hung onto the work, to her own cool detachment, with an iron grip. Ironically it was Gibbs who was liable to go off the rails when personal pain intersected with his professional life. Not Ziva.

He stared at her hard. Searching for her motivation, for a crack in her resolve. There was none.

_When you can't protect them_. Ducky's voice, the truth of it pulling at him like a tide. Pulling him back from doing something stupid. Duck was right. He'd let himself get closer to her and now it was harder. Letting her go was worse because she'd let him in, shown him her fears and accepted his help. His protection.

But that wasn't what she wanted now. She'd earned his respect and he would give it to her, no matter how it tore at him.

He took a breath, threw up his walls, and put away what he wanted.

She would miss the funeral. "Leyla and Amira will miss you."

Ziva nodded.

Gibbs let the stillness settle uncomfortably around them. Either she would tell him more or she wouldn't, but he wasn't going to make it easy for her to sweep it under the rug.

"You are picking them up from the airport tomorrow? Do you mind if I join you?"

Guess she wouldn't be telling him more.

Gibbs looked away, pushing his disappointment aside. When she worked alone her Mossad training always reared up. She wouldn't discuss the specifics if she'd been ordered not to, not even with him.

It didn't matter. He would get it out of Vance. "Fine," he said cooly. "I'm sure Leyla will be happy to see you."

He tipped his head back and finished the last of his beer. He was preoccupied with the mystery assignment, by how much he wanted to punch Vance's face down into his neck. He only noticed her stricken expression when he reached forward to set the empty bottle on the table. "Ziva?"

"Happy." Ziva breathed out forcefully and rubbed her forehead, keeping her eyes on the beads of water running down the glass. "Gibbs, you should be prepared . . . Leyla was . . . distraught. When I spoke to her."

He set the bottle down slowly.

Gibbs asked Ziva to make the call. He had some vague awareness that Ziva and Leyla were friends, though he didn't know how deep that went. The main consideration was Ziva's Arabic, anyway. He'd thought it would be a comfort to Leyla, to get the news and be able to talk to someone in her native language. Maybe it had been.

Whatever was said between the two women, making that call hit Ziva hard. By the time she rejoined the team she was hurting, in visible pain as she rarely ever was. Somehow it had gone much deeper than Mike's death. He still didn't understand why.

Gibbs had only ever seen her like that once before. Grieving.

"She thought they had more time. That it would be peaceful." Ziva shook her head, empty eyes fixed on nothing. "She has lost too many, to this - " Another deep breath. "Anyway. It will be difficult for her, without him. Far from home, no more family. No true family," she amended. "Alone."

The oven timer went off, obnoxious and tinny, loud in the stillness before it dropped away.

There was something more here, something she was keeping from him. But it was also true that Ziva could be compassionate for others in a way that ran almost impossibly deep. Gibbs suspected it was one of those qualities that she didn't even realize she had, or how much others admired it. She thought the team needed her for her skill with weapons, her training, her reflexes. Those were assets, but it wasn't what made her unique. Necessary. Ziva's compassion, though. Her empathy.

A suffocating sadness surrounded her for Leyla, an indulgence that he had never seen her take for herself. Gibbs sought to break through it. "No, she isn't. Alone. She has Amira, and they both have the team. We'll look after them. So will you." He stood. "If you're gonna be around?"

He watched her stiffen with satisfaction. _Gotcha_.

He wouldn't betray her trust, wouldn't go over her head at work. But she had something to keep herself safe for now, and he'd damn well use it to make sure she did.

She sat there, blinking after him as he walked into the kitchen. "C'mon," he called. "We'll eat out back."


	7. Ghosts

**Chapter 7: Ghosts**

**_Gibbs: _**_Would you like me to put you out of your misery, Cobb?_

**_- _From_ NCIS Pyramid_**

**x x x x x x  
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Gibbs kept mosquito-repellant candles on his deck for when he worked outside after dusk. He lit them and they sat down in the flickering light, backs up against the house and plates in their laps, food and a stack of napkins piled between them. Gibbs didn't clutter up his patio with furniture.

He ate a mound of salad and almost a quarter of the pie before breaking the easy quiet.

"What's on this," he pointed to the greens with his fork. "It's good."

"A dressing flavored with pomegranate. It was a favorite when I was young." A little hesitation, and then a gift. "My mother made it for me on special occasions."

Gibbs chewed and swallowed, squinting into the shrubs that lined his backyard without seeing them. He didn't like it when people dug into his personal life, felt awkward doing it to his agents. But he sucked it up and pried like a crowbar if that's what was needed.

"Don't talk about your mom much."

She shrugged and said nothing.

He was almost pleased. He could pry elsewhere and they would put the subject of mothers away. It was another thing the two of them would silently share - not talking about their moms much, together.

Gibbs set his plate aside and picked up the bottle of pills he'd carried out along with her tea. He tossed it at her, enjoying the snap of Ziva's reflexes as she snatched it out of the air.

She sighed, too resigned to be truly annoyed, and twisted the cap off to swallow two of the tablets down.

"You just want to make me sleepy. To get me out of your fair."

Gibbs' lips quirked up. He let his head rock back against the house and reached up to rub his eyes, relaxing completely, finally. Belly full and surrounded by the safety of his home, hidden even from Ziva by the shadows of the warm night.

He should be working on some project or other in the basement right now, not sitting idle. It felt strange, uncomfortable, to let his thoughts run helter-skelter after a tough case. The adrenaline had crashed and his guard was down and it all began to hit him, tangling up in his mind. Cobb, running circles around them for weeks. Gibbs' team - all the work of his life - relegated to second-string. And Ziva, sitting beside him with questions in her eyes, ones she was reluctant to ask. He sensed, without even knowing what they were, that he would have no answers for them. He would be battling Vance again over this assignment, fighting a Director mired in his own insecurities. And Dinozzo was up to something, Gibbs could tell. Pulling away. He depended on Tony, but he wasn't sure he should anymore. Not because he wasn't dependable - the opposite, really. Because it was selfish. Tony should be gone, flown from the nest, running his own team. Gibbs just didn't want to let him go.

He already missed Mike, crusty old pain-in-the-ass cowboy that he'd been. Mike understood him. His mentor was a refuge once, something solid and strong in an otherwise murky world. But he was gone now, another bulkhead washed away.

And tomorrow Leyla and Amira were coming. Coming to him.

Gibbs rubbed a hand through his hair and shook all that off. Reminded himself that it was useless to think about it. He would take it all as it came, one day at a time, like he'd learned to do long ago.

Ziva was looking at him closely. "You are tired?" Her voice was tinged with almost total disbelief.

Gibbs knew his agents thought he could go forever. Through anything. He could, in fact, go for a long time. But it was such an absurd question – and he was so tired. He laughed softly.

She uncrossed her legs and began to rise, the horror of a social faux-pas fixed on her Polite Guest face. "I apologize. I will leave – "

Gibbs flung out a hand and caught her sleeve.

"Sit down."

He opened his eyes and crooked his neck up to look at her.

"Seriously, Ziva. I won't be sleeping for awhile. Those pills are going to hit soon anyway." _Maybe they'll even open you up. Cause we're not done._ "Sit down."

He let his head fall back again but kept his eyes open, tracking her as she reluctantly settled next to him.

Self-pity - it never led to anything good. He felt a little bubble of disgust swell inside him, that he'd let himself drift in it even for a moment. That his agent had seen it. He turned his attention back to Ziva.

"Mike said you've been writing to Amira."

In his peripheral vision she leaned back into the house, relaxing again. "Yes. Leyla has been teaching her the Arabic alphabet, as well as English, so I write a little in each. Her mother does not want Amira to lose touch with her heritage."

Gibbs mulled that over. Picked the crowbar back up. "How about yours?"

"Hm?"

"You talk to anyone back in Israel, Ziva?"

"Sometimes." Then, off-hand, "Amira is a happy child."

Huh. Guess they weren't talking about Israel. "Yeah."

Ziva crushed the leftover pie on her plate with her fork, her eyes searching for something in the black shadows of the yard. Avoiding his gaze. "Do you think Kai was right? Justified, I mean. To go after the men who made her an assassin?"

Kai again. Gibbs took a moment to pull back, mentally, trying to evaluate where the hell this was going. Where she was going.

"I think it's our job to stop people from breaking the law," he said simply. Cautiously. "And that's what she was doing."

She gave him a _be serious _look that actually surprised him. He was totally serious.

"What about when we are the ones to break the law?"

She was either calling him on Mexico or she was in trouble herself. And Ziva didn't really sound like she was in trouble.

Gibbs went back to looking at the yard. "Well . . . we can't bring ourselves in. That would be a conflict of interest." He grinned to show he wasn't answering seriously, not now. He wasn't about to hash Mexico out with Ziva. Whatever was bugging her, his checkered past with drug dealers wasn't it.

Ziva shrugged that off. "Was she right though, do you think?"

Her voice was calm, but coldly serious. She wanted a real answer to . . . some question. What though? When was murder right? Or could it ever be? A tricky subject for the two of them.

He was pulled back to Ducky, hovering over the corpse of that pathetic Marine who'd beaten his wife.

_ . . . I wouldn't blame her if she did this._

_But that doesn't make it any less of a crime . . ._

It sounded like Ziva was trying to identify with Kai. Maybe even with him, when he'd been the man who murdered Hernandez.

Was she asking about her own revenge? Or was this one of those steps? She was done with denial - time to move on to anger?

He shook his head again, feeling more helpless than confused. He wasn't a philosopher, didn't deal in gray like Ducky did. Some questions had no answers, not as far as he could tell.

"I think that some situations don't have a right," he said slowly. "Everything about them is wrong. There's just . . . doing the job. Keeping the wrong to a minimum. Moving on."

He didn't say it, but Kai hadn't really been about revenge, or even bringing justice to the men who made her what she was. An assassin like that could have killed everyone responsible for her childhood and retired to a very nice life, sipping Mai-Tais on a beach for the rest of her days, if that was what she wanted. But she hadn't.

Kai had simply lost it. Actually lost her mind, and killed plenty of innocents along the way, just like Cobb. Then again, from what he understood Ziva hadn't been overly choosy about who she killed on the way to Saleem's camp. Now probably wasn't a real good time to remind her of that.

He was navigating a minefield, blind. "What's going on, Ziver?"

"I wanted to know what you thought."

Bullshit.

"Are you in trouble?"

She shook her head and he sat in silence for a minute, studying her intently. "Someone out there you feel the need to go after?" He'd truss her up and lock her in the basement until she came to her senses. Or at least be her back-up.

"Ha. Just one?"

Not exactly reassuring. She glanced his way and grimaced. "Do not worry, Gibbs. I am not going to go on a killing spree. Not another one, anyway." She shoved her plate aside. "It was simply on my mind, after Cobb."

No. Not buying it.

In this sort of situation, he thought wryly, Dinozzo was light years ahead of both of them. He'd managed to get his revenge on Saleem and bring Ziva back to them. The difference was Dinozzo hadn't gone off on his own, hadn't done anything dark, or even borderline illegal. He'd not only had Gibbs and McGee on his six, but also the Director and a whole frigging carrier group waiting in the wings. Sure, Gibbs and Vance arranged most of that, but Tony was the one who'd set it in motion, who assumed doing it with the agency at their backs was the smart way to go.

Gibbs startled himself, and not for the first time, with the thought that there may be certain, unique situations where he should . . . listen to Dinozzo more.

He felt a weird sense of deja-vu creep over him, but not from his own memories. It was something he'd seen in Mike's eyes, back when Gibbs really was a probie. When he'd disagreed with the boss and held his ground and been right about something, about the way it should be. He shivered as a little breeze puffed across his head, ruffling his hair.

_You do hear ghosts, probie . . . __I believe we make em. _

_We've made our share . . ._

It was Mike who pulled him back from -

He should head slap himself. He was an idiot.

"You're not like them, Ziva."

She turned to look at him. Long shadows were carved under her cheekbones and her eyes were impossible to read, impenetrable dark pits.

"Kai. Cobb," he said. "You and I have both killed . . . more than our share, probably. When we have to. Not because we're driven to it. You're not like them."

The breeze died and the world around them was absolutely still.

"I have come close."

"So have I."

Ziva nodded to acknowledge that. A sniper was not so very far from what she trained to be, and Gibbs had certainly overstepped the bounds of his training at least that once. In Mexico.

She thought of Gibbs as a rock, immovable. A needle always pointing true North. He never seemed to waver, to be tempted or confused. She knew to her bones he would never be a monster. She wondered, though, how honest he was with himself. Or maybe he was just trying to reassure her. She was fairly certain that they had both been driven to kill.

Ziva wasn't like Gibbs. Oh, she had never really been tempted by evil. But she was her father's daughter, and Ari's sister. When she was pushed she'd become confused. Twisted. She lost her way in Somalia and now she knew it was possible. Somalia had shown her the limits of her control. Ziva wasn't a rock.

She did not want to be a monster. But Cobb hadn't either, had he? Neither had Kai. It was why both of them sought their own deaths, in the end. They did not want to be what they had become.

"I am going to Spain, Gibbs. Because I am an assassin. Like Cobb." _And I was ready for death, too, wasn't I? But you pulled me back._

He looked up sharply.

Well, Ziva reasoned, Vance would probably tell him eventually anyway. And she just didn't want to face it alone.

"Bryce Leitner has returned there."

"The Port-to-Port suspect?" Gibbs searched his memory as he spoke. "Your source said he had alibis for the murders."

"Yes. Leitner could not have been the killer because he was already under surveillance when the murders occurred. He is a known mule for the Syrian government."

Ziva sat forward, until her face was in the candle light. "But he was in several cities at the same time as the murders. Leitner had definite contact with at least two of Cobb's victims."

They looked at each other, read the same words in the other's eyes.

There is no such thing as coincidence.

Cobb's voice wove through the back of Gibbs' mind._ I thought I was being trained to do what was right._

So serious, so earnest. He must have been an easy personality to manipulate. Right up until he'd gone insane. Or had he? The MO fell apart at the end, the weird habits of the precise serial killer melting away. So how much of it was real?

Gibbs ran his fingers through his hair and didn't manage to raise his head out of his hand when he was done. "The murders weren't random."

"We do not know for sure. But it seems at least some of the men Cobb killed were guilty of treason, and perhaps more. I am to trace the connection between Leitner and the first victim. Identify any other . . . unusual contacts Cobbs' victim had in Spain. Perform the same research that Cobb would have, if the murder was a targeted hit."

Gibbs let his head fall back again, his mind buzzing with the implications. What an unholy mess. "He said he thought he was trained to do what was right." Were the kills _sanctioned_?

"Yes, the Director said. But Gibbs, eventually Cobb murdered Mike, and Agent Levin as well. Whatever his intentions starting out they became twisted. Like Kai. And . . . Ari."

He really was an idiot. There was a question in her voice, and all that earlier stuff made sense now. Struggling to understand Kai, and Cobb. Even her brother.

She was looking at him. Waiting. "Yeah."

_What would be the humane thing to do, Agent Gibbs?_

_You do hear ghosts._

Ducky, whispering to him. _You and I both know Mike Franks might have picked a fight . . ._

Cobb was in his house. That meant he knew Mike was sick. And Levin, they didn't know a damn thing about him, did they? Except that he had been killed by a precision shot.

He'd thought he finally caught up with Cobb when he killed him. But it looked like Cobb was a step ahead even in death. And Vance was sending Ziva. She would be the one agent at NCIS most able to think like Cobb. To follow in the footsteps of an assassin.

"Don't assume anything," he reminded her. "About any of his kills."

"Alright."

_Don't get lost in that. You're not an assassin anymore. _

She wouldn't hear him if he said it. She was obviously already feeling lost.

Ziva yawned hugely and slumped down even farther against the wall.

"How's the head?"

"Hurts." She went still suddenly, after she said that. Probably shocked she had.

"C'mon." Gibbs stood, feeling old as he worked awkwardly around his bum knee, and reached back down to haul her up. "There's a cot in the basement."

She nodded and used his hand to pull herself nimbly to her feet, then slipped out of his grasp and tipped lazily toward the house. She was about ready to crash through the plate glass of the patio doors when he reached out and seized hold of the back of her shirt.

Looked like the pills had kicked in. "Steady on, sailor."

She leaned forward, easily touching the glass, and Gibbs suppressed a shudder. If she'd gone through that window Ducky would have had his ass.

Once, soon after he'd started working with Jenny in Europe, Gibbs had gotten them into a bad scrape by taking a series of . . . well, stupid risks was the only way to put it, really. He wasn't used to being responsible for a less experienced partner and they'd just barely gotten out of it with their lives. Ducky was over there with them at the time and knew all about it. He'd waited until he and Gibbs were on an airplane together. It was a little puddle jumper and they were wedged into bucket seats half an inch apart. No possibility of escape. As they taxied down the runway charming old Ducky began a story about vivisection that went on and on. And on.

It was as horrifyingly gruesome as it was boring, and about halfway through the flight Gibbs got the point. Finally, just before they came into land, he'd . . . well, he hadn't apologized exactly. But he expressed regret for endangering his probie and promised to avoid doing it so cavalearly down the road. Ducky had smiled and patted his knee and said, "Good lad. Do try to look after yourself as well, won't you?"

And that was the end of stories about dissecting bodies while they were still alive.

He had a feeling that Duck would look forward to giving him an even more . . . vivid experience with vivisection if a stitched-up, concussed Ziva came to catastrophic harm in his house, right under his nose. All because he'd shoved Ducky's own pain-killers down her throat and then neglected to look after her.

"Gibbs." She set both hands on the wooden frame of the door and pushed at it ineffectually, drawing out every letter of his name as if it were its own syllable. "I put honey in my tea."

"Yeah?" No kidding.

"Are you not tired of being nice to me?"

Are you not. Only Ziva. She'd been here long enough to pick up contractions. He was pretty sure she just considered them lazy.

He shifted his grip to her arm and reached down with his free hand to turn the handle. "I think your radar for nice is a little off."

The door swung inward and all of Ziva's weight lurched forward to follow it. Gibbs' grip kept her standing until her other arm came up to rest on the nearest wall, pushing her upright. Once she'd steadied she turned and looked at him seriously.

"You did not answer the question."

"No."

No, he was not tired of being nice? She considered that as he propelled her through the back hall, toward the kitchen and the basement steps. Her body was a little floaty, but her mind was still sharp enough, she was certain.

"I do not believe you."

"You'll get tired of it first," he assured her.

She was like a noodle, muscles relaxed and going every which way. Almost disturbing flexible, like babies were. She must do a lot of stretching. Every woman he'd ever known who worked out regularly was obsessed with stretching.

"Tony does not like it when you are nice," she said. "McGee told me so."

Seemed she had a hang-up about that. He propped her against the kitchen wall to open the basement door. "Neither do you."

"But he likes you. And you like him!" she cried out, totally out of the blue. She leaned toward the open doorway, moving forward just as confidently as she spoke. He grabbed her arm and controlled the fall down to the first step, pulling back on her upper body while the rest of her swayed forward, as if the stairs were a pool she was determined to dive into.

"Not as much as you." He nudged her slowly down the steps. The two of them were a tight fit.

"Gibbs!"

He grinned. "Which is kind of interesting, actually. What's your boyfriend think about that?"

"_Gibbs_!" He almost laughed. She might have been trying for serious, but they weren't being serious, and she was too doped to fake it. Her voice was a mix of scolding and reproach and cheery, floppy sing-song, a semi-offended warble she could only have picked up from Abby.

"I am boozy. Woozy! Tony and I are - oh, whoops!" He grunted. She'd staggered and managed to step on both of his feet at the same time. "Professionals. And that was . . . below the felt. Um, belt."

They'd finally reached the bottom.

"Better not be," he muttered, and set her against one of the walls, way back from the tools. He turned to drag the cot out.

Ziva sighed – the only word for it – lustily. "We follow your rules."

He grinned. "I know."

"Of course you do."

She went on mournfully, totally over the top. "You know, in Mossad we were not so prudish. I slept with several of my partners," she said airily. "And commanding officers."

That last bit was definitely sultry. Gibbs laughed out loud. She watched him, grinning ridiculously, proud she'd gotten him to crack.

"It was not the end of the world. Very good for stress-relief, actually. And you like him," she reminded him. "I do not see the projection." She shook her head and then put up a hand to hold it. "_Ow._ Objection. In principle."

Well, he'd only slept with one partner, but it'd been a damn hot mess by the end. He'd given up wondering if he would have seen Jenny going off the rails sooner, if he hadn't held that old loyalty to her. Gibbs shook out the blanket and spread it over the cot.

"Yeah? How'd that work out for you?"

Ziva looked at him as he turned to face her. "O-_kay_, Gibbs. Yes. One or two may have betrayed me. To my father, which is disturbing. More disturbing, I mean. But!" She flung up a hand, pointing a righteous finger at him. "I knew I could not completely trust them from the get-set anyway. The get-start!" the finger stabbed again. "Um . . ." she frowned, righteous finger hanging in the breeze, forgotten.

Looked like she'd be puzzling that one out for hours.

"The get-go."

"Yes! So it did not matter."

Right. And not completely trusting the team had only taken him five years to undo. Not to mention it was distrust of her partner that set the stage for Somalia.

It was the sort of silence that said what he was thinking louder than any words possibly could.

She walked forward and sat abruptly on the cot. "Jenny was right. You are one of those . . ." she waved a hand and - nothing. Trailed off.

Gibbs stiffened a little. It was easy to forget that Ziva and Jenny were friends, before everything. They'd deliberately made it easy to forget, to avoid the hassle of teammates and subordinates seeing the two women, both new to NCIS, as a unit.

Gibbs wondered, not for the first time, exactly how much Jen told Ziva. How close were they, before NCIS? How close had they remained? Did she know he was with Jenny for awhile? That it was Jen who pulled away? That she was sick? Did Jen _confide_ in her? Ziva could be incredibly discreet when she wanted to be – she'd certainly kept her share of secrets from Gibbs before.

Maybe he'd find out a few new ones. "One of those . . . ?"

"One of those men," Ziva nodded. "Right. Irritating."

He frowned down at her and she grinned at him lazily.

"Ah. Perhaps it was, 'Irritating when they are right.'"

He leaned against a saw bench and grinned, too. He could hear Jen's voice saying that. 'That's what makes you so damn irritating, Jethro . . . '

For a moment her memory was a tangible thing, hovering there between them. Like a ghost.

_You do hear ghosts._

He heard too many.

"McGee says you were kind to them after Kate was killed."

Fucking hell.

"But after Jenny you were angry."

His eyes slid from hers until he found himself staring at the floor. Ziva was tired, doped up. Swinging from laughter to pain in the blink of an eye. It wrenched at him more than it usually would, with Jenny in the air between them. And him tired too.

This was where he would walk away, if it was anyone else. If he hadn't all but promised Ducky . . . if she wasn't crashing through plate glass in her mind. Wasn't a raw wound, somewhere.

Something was wrong though, had been since Mike died, and he sensed she was finally closing in on it. Trouble was it felt like she was taking him along with her this time. Up till now most of the pain had been hers. Things that only cut at him second-hand, because they had hurt her. This was different, though. He had his own scars here.

"How do you do it?"

She was looking at him. Waiting for an answer.

* * *

><p><em>tbc, of course . . .<em>

**a/n:** Thanks once again for all of the reviews and suggestions, folks! I really appreciate them. A few people don't have a PM option on their review handles and may yet leave response-inducing comments, so I'll just impose on this general space and respond in lengthy fashion here.

Someone with the very cute handle of 'snail' (snails are cute - don't tell me they aren't) suggested in his/her thoughtful review that Ziva would tell Gibbs about her secret mission from Vance without so much hesitation because she trusts him enough to share classified stuff. That got me thinking, which is always pleasant, so thank you, snail.

Well, Ziva did tell him in this chapter so I kind of agree, but I actually think this is me changing Ziva's character slightly, making her closer to Gibbs and more willing to share information with him than she is on the show.

Here's my interpretation: I think Ziva trusts Gibbs but I don't think she's been very into sharing things, even with him, unless she's almost forced to do it. I've always thought that Gibbs and Ziva keeping so many secrets - even from each other - is one of the things they have in common. Actually, I wonder if it isn't something that Gibbs sort of encourages his whole team to do, even if he doesn't realize he's doing it, since he's so secretive and he's their role model.

It's all open to interpretation, which is part of the fun of the show, but I read both Ziva and Gibbs as being pretty tight lipped. She kept the details of Ari and of Rivkin a secret from him. She also kept what happened on the Damocles a secret until she was forced to give it up, even though it was bothering her, and in 'Good Cop, Bad Cop' said to Vance, "I cannot comment on Mossad operations!" even after she'd resigned from Mossad. I think that policy of not revealing things about her work for Mossad extends to Gibbs. And when she finds out from CIRay that the current P2P suspect has an alibi, Ziva tells Gibbs that she has info but insists "I cannot tell you how I know this and you cannot ask." She's protecting Ray, even from Gibbs.

For Gibbs part, remember in 'Judgement Day' when Mike and Gibbs are sitting in a diner discussing what happened to Jenny and Mike Franks brings up a classified operation that only Gibbs is supposed to know about? Gibbs looks a little green and Mike rolls his eyes and says, "Relax, probie, classified went out the window.' I took that to mean that Gibbs doesn't even tell Franks about classified stuff, or only does so reluctantly. Gibbs sure didn't tell Tony about Barrett's connection to SecNav, and I think the show sort of hints that Gibbs knows more about her than we or the rest of his team knows with that "Anything else you'd like to tell me, Barrett?" line from the last episode.

So I guess I think that it could go either way, that everyone on Team Gibbs trusts everyone else enough to reveal secrets if they need to, but they're all still prone to keeping their secrets anyway. Of course, wondering about all of those secrets is part of the fun . . .


	8. Monsters

**a/n:** _Thanks as ever for your thoughts and encouragements on this little adventure. An especial thanks for this chapter goes out to AnotherStupidNickname, whose comment on the last installment of the story got me thinking. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts - particularly if you spot loose ends to be addressed!_

**Chapter 8: Monsters**

_**Ziva:**__ There is always another monster._

_**Tony:**__ Yep._

_**Ziva:**__ . . . we just keep making targets of ourselves. I don't think I can take anymore._

_**- **_**From**_** NCIS Swan Song**_

**x x x x x x**

He shook himself back to the present and walked over to the work bench to look over what was there. Not really seeing any of it.

He didn't understand what she was talking about, what she was asking.

And he understood too well, more than he wanted to. Just from the edge in her voice.

Gibbs set his hands on the counter, gathered the will. When he'd found enough he turned around and leaned against the work bench, the weight of the wood solid at his back. Facing her, meeting her gaze. Silent permission, really, to go on.

She went for it alright.

Her eyes were burning, resting on him like dark coals. "You live in this house," she looked over his shoulders, soaking in the walls. "You bought this with your first wife."

Her gaze wandered up to the ceiling, as if in wonder, and then back at him. "So that you could raise a family here."

He met her eyes and was startled by how familiar they seemed. The painkillers had stripped away her masks, all the pretense and bravado that protected her from . . . this. Ziva looked at him like his mother used to, when she knew time was running out. With the awful knowledge that she would never see him grown, never know him as a man. That life could be cruel.

"You lost them, yet you are living here still. In this house."

She watched him, the question in her eyes, but his face, his body, said nothing at all.

"You must see them everywhere."

Nothing. Nothing from him.

"And Kate. She was special to you, wasn't she? More than a teammate. Ari could see things like that."

Her eyes landed on one of the small windows and stayed there, even though they were pitch black. As if she could escape this room and the things in it, and in her own mind, if she only kept her eyes busy enough elsewhere.

"Ari was perceptive, even when very young. He used to startle my father. It was the only time I ever saw Eli surprised. Ari was . . . the word is eerie. I have always believed that is why he killed her first. And waited to do it in front of you. It wasn't just that she was a woman. He saw something more."

And then Gibbs wasn't looking at Ziva anymore. He was looking through her.

Because Kate, she hadn't been . . but she might have. He didn't see how Ari could have known that, though. He wasn't exactly sure that _Kate_ had known it.

Except Ari spoke to Kate several times when Gibbs wasn't there, hadn't he. It was Ducky who'd seen them together, observed them interacting. And Duck had pointed out their odd connection, been concerned about it.

No one would ever know, now, what she might have said to that bastard. About Gibbs, and about herself . . .

"And Jenny. You - cared for her."

Gibbs straightened the smallest bit. Took a subtle breath.

He'd answered Ducky's challenge, he reminded himself. He couldn't run away.

So he let his thoughts run instead, far behind his eyes, from a basement that felt like a cemetery - choked with ghosts.

Not the ghosts of Hollywood or the Disney movies that little girls watch. These were the real ones, that hit harder than any living man ever could, and cut more than you thought it possible to bleed.

Jenny had . . . she'd felt something for him. He would never know what the two of them might have been. It didn't matter now . . .

"She was glad, you know. That she did not act on what was between you. She felt very deeply for you, Gibbs." Ziva kept her eyes on the window. Letting him take this alone.

"Jenny cared enough to be glad that she spared you from losing another."

So. That was a confidence, alright. Jenny confided near the end. But not in him. One secret down. Or was that two? Losing another . . . love.

Gibbs decided that knowing wasn't any better. There was no _better_, really. Only loss. Vengeance. And then time. Maybe moving on. Learning to accept it. To live with it.

"And Mike now. There must be others as well. People with names I do not know. Will never know."

His gaze refocused, came back to her. And he thought, with a little laugh that never found voice, _small mercies_.

She was a hell of an interrogator when she wanted to be.

Ziva's eyes left the tiny dark window to find his.

He just looked back at her, totally bland. As if she'd read him a grocery list. Anything he might feel for any of the people he lost was buried far away, something she would never touch. That and the drugs were what made her able to say this. To do this to him.

Because Ari was wrong. Gibbs wasn't cold like their father. When his people were in trouble he threw himself after them, body and soul. When they were in danger he agonized for them. And when they were lost he grieved.

Privately, yes, but she recognized at least that it was there.

Her father - well, he was not so brave. He did not have Gibbs' raw _courage_. Eli protected himself from the hurt. From making connections. From holding onto them.

Ziva had done the same in her life so far, hadn't she? What did she have that was permanent? Had she allowed anything at all in close - into her heart - after Tali died?

And yet here was Gibbs. Pulling her close. Onto his team, and his porch. Into his home. Somehow . . .

She took a breath.

"How do you stand it? There's always another monster . . and they keep . . . taking . . . Why are you still here?"

It wasn't just some rhetorical question. She was honestly asking him.

He looked at her without any compassion at all, and when he finally spoke, the words were terse.

"Are you asking me why I didn't eat my gun?"

Because if she didn't have her own answer for that he was pretty sure he didn't have one to give her. And she was in worse shape than he'd thought.

She jerked and looked at him sharply, suddenly, as if she'd never seen him before. There was pin-drop stillness around them.

"N-No! I am asking why you are not on a beach, in Mexico. Or teaching at FLETC. Building boats!"

She was yelling now, as if what he'd said frightened her. Her voice strained around the words, like she was trying to bring the anger under control. Or –

"You're still here. And they keep –"

He kept his face still. He'd watched thousands of women cry on the job. But never Ziva. Gibbs had never actually seen it. He'd heard her, over a phone, patched through satellites. And he'd sat close, felt it as he held her hand. But even that one time on the porch it'd been silent, hidden. A controlled release.

This was different. It must have been the drugs.

Gibbs resisted the urge to move. Closer or farther away, he wasn't sure. He just wanted to move. To avert his eyes.

"They keep coming. It could have been me, today." She fought hard for control, breathing past hitches that threatened to grow into something impossible to swallow.

The words came hard and fast instead. "I know Ari shot into Abby's lab. He missed her head by inches. By chance."

She stared at him, beseeching. "You love her. But if she had died Gibbs, you would still be here. You would be in her lab, everyday, you would see her. How can you – "

She raised her hands to her eyes. Bent over her knees, shuddering. And was gone.

His instincts pushed at him to go to her, but still he didn't move. She'd thrown the people he lost at him like bricks through windows, and they surrounded him now. It would cut to the bone if he tried to move through that.

She quieted quickly anyway, grabbing up the emotions choking her and throttling them down, he was sure. When she spoke again her voice was no longer hoarse with feeling. Exhaustion had set in.

"I am sorry, Gibbs. I do not know if I can take anymore."

She was done.

He turned away finally, wooden, pouring a finger of bourbon and drinking it down. Feeling like he had failed that, somehow. But there were limits to what he could take. His team, his agents, they didn't see them. He didn't let them. But they were there.

He looked at the spot where Ari died, so sweetly, and it suddenly occurred to him that bringing her down here to sleep may not have been the smartest move he ever made.

He'd forgotten. Not that the man died here. Just that it meant something so different to her.

"Do you want to go upstairs?"

She started, surprised to hear his voice. "What?"

He shook his head, letting it go. He hadn't wanted her to go home alone, but he should have slept before this. He was tired. Making mistakes. And he still didn't -

Gibbs cut himself off. Second-guessing was beyond useless, and they were here now anyway, no matter what he should have done.

He searched back over what she'd said, looking for something he could actually . . . touch.

"I didn't live here with my," he grimaced, "first ex-wife."

She snuffled wetly and ran her hands down her face. When she looked at him, finally, her eyes were red and confused. Totally lost.

"I was traveling a lot," he explained patiently. "Living abroad. I didn't stay here after they died. Not for a long time."

And you didn't go back to Israel after Ari. Not, he understood now, because she needed to protect herself from Mossad. It was her brother's memory that chased her so far away from home. And onto his team.

"You were good for us, after Kate died," he continued. "You were different. Kept us from looking at an empty chair."

Was that a cruel thing to say? He wasn't sure. But it was true.

He crossing his arms over his chest and studied her face. Groping for what to say.

"Ziva - "

It was still between them. All that loss. All around him, like a bed of nails. Or - the irony - the walls of a city under siege. His own this time.

But she was leaving, the day after tomorrow, and it couldn't be like this.

_Suck it up, Marine_. He grit his teeth, picked up feet made of lead, and slowly crossed the basement to her. Sat on the floor, leaning back again the cot. Looked at the tools hung up on the pegboard behind his workbench.

He wouldn't touch anything else she'd said. It wasn't relevant anyway.

"Risk is part of the job, Ziva," he said firmly. "Always has been. Losing people, that's a part of life. Always will be. So why don't you tell me what's really going on?"

She didn't respond.

_There's always another monster . . . They keep coming . . ._

"Is it Cobb, Ziva? What he could have done, even though he didn't?"

Of course it was, Gibbs thought. Another had come for her. Taken her.

But it felt like - like that wasn't all. She'd been _better_ after they began talking. Facing Somalia, all the things about her captivity, and her father's betrayal, that had chased her to him. Gibbs knew that she'd been better, had seen it day to day on the job. Now he wondered if all that had been lost. Because of Cobb.

He felt the anger burning low in him, again, though he knew it was pointless. Cobb was dead.

Ziva clenched her hands. There was no hiding from Gibbs. But she knew he would never stumble or grope or guess his way to this. She would have to tell him if he was ever going to drop it. She sighed.

"What Cobb could have done. That he could have assaulted me, more than he did? He took Mike from us," she said listlessly. "Isn't that enough?"

Gibbs shook his head. It didn't add up. And he could feel it in his bones when his agents tried to dodge him. "Not following you, Ziva. Mike was a good man. But you weren't that close."

She shifted and he turned a little to look at her. She really was woozy now, her head swaying a little even with her body slumped on the cot.

Come on, Ziva.

"Tell me."

Someone who wasn't a bastard might feel bad, pressing her when she was vulnerable. But Gibbs was a bastard.

"No," she said finally. "Not to Mike. But I am to you."

He frowned, waiting for her to make sense of that. "Still not - "

"Gibbs," she groaned quietly, frustrated, then seemed to reign herself in with a deep breath. "How can you - is it not obvious? Mike Franks _goaded_ Cobb into killing him. He wanted to die as he lived - fighting." She looked at him pointedly and he looked back, still waiting.

That was all true about Mike. But he was no closer to understanding what the hell she was talking about.

"Yeah?"

She turned her face away and closed her eyes and tried her hardest to bury it all before she spoke, like he did. To tap into that emptiness somehow. It was too much to feel, too much to lose, and she _couldn't_ anymore.

Things had changed. She'd let him in - well, he'd pounded his way in, really. She'd resisted, tried to run that first night. Tried to stay away after it. But he kept coming, and now it was done.

She looked at the silvery ring on her finger. They were close, connected. Like family. It was . . . permanent.

Which is what she had wanted.

Ziva felt a swell of panic rise up from her gut. It gripped her throat and squeezed.

She had felt fear in her life, many times. And despair. But she'd never been prone to panic before. Not until now. In the past few days she had come to know it all too well. Since she first heard that Mike had been killed at Gibbs' house, chasing yet another monster.

Like a premonition.

"That will be _you_ one day, Gibbs. Of course it will. You on that autopsy table. You are the same," she hissed. Her hands came up and pressed into her head, as if to keep it from flying apart. "Actually, I think you are worse," she said dully. "You are healthy, but already you chase it. You dared Ari to kill you. Dared me to save you. You did not think I would, did you? You knew he was family."

He pulled back a little in surprise and stared at that spot on the floor. Where Ari fell. Thrown back to that day.

He'd suspected. And yes, he'd been prepared. To die.

Not to face questions like this.

"I wasn't sure," he admitted.

"You have been goading death for twenty years. You must be the luckiest man alive. Or the unluckiest."

He couldn't exactly deny that. "I didn't know he was your brother, but I suspected you were close," he said quietly. "I am sorry that you had to do it - to kill him, Ziva." He hesitated. "That I asked it of you."

_Like your father._ Gibbs hadn't known the extent of the relationship between Ziva and Ari. But he'd known something was there. Of course he had. The way she'd defended him, so desperate to believe he was innocent . . .

Gibbs asked her to be the one to take Ari down anyway.

Maybe she was right. Maybe he'd been tempting fate.

Ziva snorted. "I was determined to rescue him. If you killed Ari I never would have believed he turned on Mossad. I would have killed you in retaliation. Then you would both be dead."

"Yeah. Maybe."

"I do not want to live to see that day, Gibbs. I do not want to be so close . . . to watch Ducky - in front of my eyes."

He nodded. He knew her background. He should have seen this coming. Ziva was a ping-pong ball before she came to NCIS, a lot like Dinozzo. She hadn't let anyone close, not really. She'd never needed to before.

And he understood now. There was pain, where there was love. And fear. Anyone who had lost, really lost someone, knew that. It was a part of it.

"But that is how you bear it, isn't it?" she said coldly. "All of what they take from us, and the risk. Whatever they will take in the future. You have embraced your own death."

The betrayal was clear in her voice. That he had brought her close, and would leave her one day. Was willing to leave.

_Daddy, don't go._

He backed away from that.

These weren't the sorts of things he asked himself. But Gibbs sat on his basement floor and forced himself to think it over now. Sending her off to Spain in the footsteps of a suicidal assassin, her mentor "embracing death" in her mind - well, not a good idea.

"I don't fear it, if that's what you're getting at. I accepted the risk, Ziva. There's a difference. I'd be happy to die in my bed of old age. I did try to retire, if you remember."

Ziva swiped at her eyes. "Yes. For a distressingly brief time. Why did you come back?"

He looked at her. "Well, _someone_ called me up for help. Someone hunted by NCIS, the FBI, rogue Iranians, and Mossad. All at the same time. That takes a 'special' kind of talent."

Ziva didn't blink an eye. "Well, she sounds like a total idiot to me. You should have left her to her fate." She took a breath and continued quietly, sadly. "Or at least gone back to retirement after you saved her."

"Hm." Gibbs massaged his bad knee absently. "Well, I owed her my life," he said. "So I had to come back. And I was already starting to remember."

She threw him a puzzled, muzzy look.

And then she sort of flopped over, hitting the cot with a rattle and a groan. It wasn't exactly as soft as a bed.

She scrunched the pillow he'd thrown at the end of the cot up under her head, clear of the sore bump just above her neck, and looking at him with droopy eyes.

"I didn't remember much after coming out of that coma, Ziva. Didn't really remember the team, beyond the basics. It came back in pieces."

Not the memories. The feeling. Who he was, and the things that mattered to him. That had taken time to come back, and even longer to accept. But it had come. In great big pieces, once he returned to DC and started working with them again.

"Wait. You came back . . . because of the team?"

He laughed for the second time that night at her disbelief. "The team is good, Ziva. Better than any I've ever had before, anywhere. That's not something to throw away."

Because the monsters would take their share anyway. You had to hold onto the good with both hands.

"You came back because of the _team_?"

"Yeah," he seemed surprised at her surprise. "But don't ever tell Dinozzo I said that."

"Do not worry," she said faintly. "He would not believe me."

"You could try to leave the job behind, find something else. But I think you're gonna run into the same problem I did, Ziva. You're too good to quit. And if you do - it's just another thing you've let them take from you."

She looked at him tiredly.

"You fight back by minimizing the risks," he pressed. "You watch our backs. Let us watch yours."

Her eyes were closing, so he leaned in close. She didn't seem to notice. He lifted an unnaturally slow hand, and when she allowed it, smoothed back her hair once, ghosting over the tender spots.

It must have been the drugs.

"I'll give you an example. Next time we're hunting down a psychopath, you don't go into an unknown situation without back-up. Never again, you got me Ziver? Or you won't have to worry about retirement. I'll retire you myself."

She fell asleep before his eyes.

**x x x x x x**

He pushed open the screen door the next morning and found her on the porch, sitting on the stone ledge, watching the world go by. When she turned to face him she looked startled, as if he'd just goosed her.

"I told you about my mission." Her tone carried the _And I can't believe it_.

"Hm," he kept the door open and leaned lightly on it, half in and half out of the house. "Well, I am an excellent interrogator."

She looked affronted. "You cheated. I was doped!"

He grinned. "If you say so."

Ziva shook her head and he stepped farther out onto the porch, letting the door swing closed behind him. She looked like she'd lost her anchor and her compass, all in one go.

Private confidences were one thing, he supposed. Work was something else.

And Gibbs wasn't known for being discreet. Lord knows he was tempted to call Vance last night. He climbed the stairs after he'd left her passed out in his basement determined to do just that. Screw the fact that it was 0200. He'd had the phone in his hand, the Director's home number glowing up at him.

"Look at it this way," he said, leaning against the wood railing across from her. "You can always fall back on being doped. If Vance ever finds out."

She scoffed even as she searched his face for the truth. "You mean to tell me he does not already know? You have not -" she waved a knowing hand at him, " - called him up and berated him for sending me on a mission you have not approved?" She continued darkly, "Endangering your fragile probationary agent?"

"Nope," he said. As if he hadn't come close. "He's the Director. You're a big girl. And none of my agents are fragile."

"Huh," she said. She looked him over like she saw straight through his bluff. Like she knew it had been a close thing. Ziva was as good at reading him these days as Dinozzo was.

Gibbs grimaced. All that talking, the getting-to-know-you thing. It cut both ways.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Gibbs crossed his arms. "Like what?"

"Like you are confused." She drew herself up into a suspicious posture. "Like you are trying to figure something out. I have done nothing confusing this morning. Last night, yes." She put her nose up into the air a little, and he didn't bother holding back a smile. "But that was because you cheated."

He let his eyes run over her. She was definitely looking better this morning, and from the sound of it, feeling better too. Back to sharp and demanding. Back to Ziva.

"Hey, you've got nothing to worry about," he said lightly. "I'm not gonna pass your confidences on to Ray." He raised his eyebrows. "Or Tony."

"I did not confide in you about either one of them," she sniffed. Clearly not buying it.

He rolled his shoulders and met her eyes again, considering what to say.

And decided just to say it, because he believed what he had said to her. She wasn't fragile.

"I thought Cobb would be a bigger issue," he admitted. "But you didn't talk about him."

She kept looking at him, eyes calm and steady. He scratched his chin and turned to study his shaggier than usual grass. He should cut it before he brought Leyla and Amira back here.

"I'm not Ducky, Ziva. I don't know if I'm missing something, or just not understanding what's happening here. What I know is that Cobb attacked from behind, knocked you unconscious, and confined your movements. I thought those were surefire triggers."

He looked at her again. Waited for her to respond.

"Yes," she said finally.

Gibbs turned back to his grass, feeling his way. She was leaving tomorrow - he had to be sure before he let that happen. "But they weren't this time?"

He almost held his breath.

"No."

"Sure about that?"

He saw her shrug out of the corner of his eye. "It did not affect me in the same way."

He relaxed. Somewhat. He was pretty sure that Ducky, or some professionally trained shrink, wouldn't just ask out right.

Oh well. "Why not?"

He could feel it as she turned her eyes from him, went back to watching the world go by.

"It was the beginning of all my nightmares. That is true. But Cobb changed the ending," she paused. "Instead of waking up to find those - the monsters above me, I found you. The team." She rubbed her hands down the thighs of her sleep rumpled jeans.

He waited and she smiled a little. He always knew. When there was something more.

"And I think I found me too, Gibbs," her voice held wonder, and not a little pride. "The nightmare came true, but I - " she stopped again, searching for the words to match the feeling.

"You fought. And won."

He understood then. That Cobb had overpowered her wasn't the point. The fight Ziva won that day was the bigger one. The harder one.

She nodded slowly. "My fear did not overwhelm me. My focus stayed on the job. All the monsters - " she waved a hand at the world. "It is like . . . that part of my mind that broke away in Somalia, and would not come back . . . it understands, now. A little anyway. That they are not so powerful as it feared."

He looked at her thoughtfully, thinking back to that barn, to finding her. She hadn't pulled away when he'd come in close to look at the wound.

He'd thought it was because she had a concussion. But maybe -

"You didn't notice," he said aloud. It was falling into place.

She frowned at him, but he didn't bother to explain. Gibbs didn't think she'd ever realized she was doing it. Or maybe she just didn't think he detected it - Ziva had great self-control, and the changes had been minute.

But Gibbs saw them. And he always backed away. He hadn't come too close in almost two years.

He pushed himself up off the railing and walked toward her slowly, crooking a finger at her. "C'mere."

Ziva put aside her confusion and slid off her favorite bench, standing before him promptly, back straight and eyes alert. An agent reporting for duty.

He grinned a little. Did she think he was going to send her on a breakfast mission?

He stepped forward slowly, put his arms up gently, watching her. But she didn't lean away. Didn't drop her eyes. Didn't tense up as he folded her into him.

She relaxed when he put a hand up to her hair, and something inside him that had been wary since the day he spotted her in that dusty hellhole unclenched.

"I'm glad, Ziver," he whispered.

She turned her cheek to rest on his shoulder and hugged back hard enough to make Abby proud.

"But there is something else now," she said.

"I know."

He pulled back a little and held her in front of him, looking into her face closely. "But we're gonna have your back. If you let us."

He rolled his eyes at her frown, and the impatient little Ziva-sigh. The _that's not the point_ sigh. Gibbs tilted his head in acknowledgement. "And you'll have mine."

She nodded solemnly. "I will. For the team. For Amira." And she tossed her head. A very_ I don't care if you let me or not_, toss.

He studied her. So they were striking a deal?

"Hm. You call me if it gets hinky in Spain. Not Vance. Me. And you stay safe - no stunts, Ziva."

She closed her eyes and nodded, firm. Strong.

"And you," she said.

He kissed her cheek, and then he let her go.

* * *

><p><strong>an** part deux: Hope you liked it, readers. I'm marking this story complete now as it has somewhat of an arc at this point, but I may come back to fiddle with it from time to time, particularly when the new season starts up.

In the meantime, I feel Gibbs has been neglecting his other agents!


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